That which does not kill us makes us stronger.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
In the November 2002, Information Security Magazine article, Infosec’s Worst NightMares, Ed Skoudis lists the Top 5 Worst Attacks of 1998 – 2002. Mr. Skoudis is the founders of Intelguardians Network Intelligence, LLC and is a handler of the very popular Internet Storm Center.
Mr. Skoudis mentions that the Top five major destructive attacks of 1998 – 2002 made many industries “battle-tested†and more likely to be proactive rather than reactive. The 5 year Worst Skoudis list is based on exploits that shook our very faith in the Internet and security of e-commerce.
1. Code Red (2001). July 13 2001, the worm attacked Microsoft IIS systems. By 19 July 2001, the worm had affected over 350,000 systems. SANS and Honeynet Project set up honey pots to capture the worm. But E-eye Digital Security Programmers did the most intense research on the worm and also named it. The worm exploited a vulnerability in the indexing software distributed with IIS, described in Microsoft’s MS01-033 patch. It was a buffer overflow attack. Some of the lessons learned: Keep systems patched, use of honey pots to capture malware, coordinated response helps to contain worms.
2. Nimda (2001). Shortly after 9/11, the Nimda worm was unleashed. It caused more damage financially than Code Red. There were rumors that it was China that released it to hurt the US further, but this is unlikely due to the nature of Nimda.
While it was bad, it had the appearance of a being written by a determined amateur, not a nation-state that spends $1 Billion annually on cyberwarfare capabilities. – Skoudis.
Nimda affected Windows 95, 98, Me, NT, or 2000 and servers running Windows NT and 2000. It was so affective because it attacked IIS, e-mail, browsers and network shares. This multi dimensional attack method could mark a trend in future cyberfare.
Lessons Learned: The importance of an incident response capability, disabling arbitrary scripts in e-mail and browsers.
3. Melissa (1999) & LoveLetter (2000). Both of these exploited malware through e-mail propagation. Melissa used Microsoft Word Macro virus and LoveLetter (I Love You Virus). The worm harvested the victims address book to forward itself to more victims which killed a lot of email servers. Lessons Learned: Many companies got serious about implementing anti-virus applications throughout the network.
4. Distributed Denial-of-Service (DdoS) attacks (2000). After all the panic of pre-Y2K, a completely new and unexpected storm hit major sites: Yahoo!, Amazon, CNN, E*Trade ZDNet and eBay. All by a single child hacker nicked named Mafiaboy. He had spread zombie flooding agents to hundreds of machines around the world and used them to attack sites with billions of useless packets. Lessons Learned: employ anti-spoofing filters.
5. Remote Control Trojan Horse Backdoors (1998 – 2000). In 1998, the Cult of the Dead Cow hackers group created the Trojan, Back Orifice which initially targeted Windows NT/9x. The tool allowed unskilled attackers to attack any vulnerable system. It also marked the rise of the “script kiddies†and produced a bunch of spin offs such as Subseven, Netbus and Hack-a-Tack.
