Cyber Security Awareness Month - Day 10 - The Questionable Ports

Published: 2009-10-10
Last Updated: 2009-10-15 20:45:17 UTC
by Tony Carothers (Version: 2)
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The Internet Storm Center is focusing on IP ports for the month of October.  I am going to continue the theme, but with a bit of a twist.  I am going to talk about a few of the ports that are usually not desirable to appear in a traffic analysis.  There are many more than I could list, the majority associated with malware.  But not all of them.  Here we go:

1214 - Limewire/Kazaa (A Peer-to-Peer application.  Not by definition malware, but not something desirable in an enterprise)

2773 - SubSeven (Trojan)

5631 - pcAnywhere (A commercial remote control application)

1863 - Numerous Microsoft applications

I want to emphasize that these listed are not necessarily bad.  The point here is awareness.  Knowledge, and management, of the ports required and permitted in the enterprise, and at home, will lead to an overall improvement of the security posture of a network.  This is where syslogs, traffic analysis, and documentation will tie everything together.

I welcome any and all thoughts, comments, questions, queries, concerns, etc.  I will post updates to this story as comments come in to the ISC.

tony d0t carothers @ isc d0t sans d0t org

Keywords:
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User Notification for Possible Infected Systems

Published: 2009-10-10
Last Updated: 2009-10-10 15:24:58 UTC
by Tony Carothers (Version: 2)
3 comment(s)

One of our readers, Roy, came across this article from Yahoo! this morning reporting that Comcast is planning to enlist it's customers help in the fight against botnets by using pop-up alerts. Comcast's general idea is that, if Comcast notes traffic associated with known botnet activity, a pop-up will appear on the user's computer. The article gives the full details as reported by the Assosciated Press.

The last paragraph, from an overall security perspective, is the most concerning to me, and that is the use of hoax popups and sites. I quote "Phil Lin, marketing director at network security firm FireEye Inc., said hackers could mimic Comcast's pop-up banner or the confirmation ads. And unsuspecting customers wouldn't know they should expect to see a confirmation from Comcast in the first place."  We know it is only a matter of time, and my guess is it will be a very short time, before the botnet farmers start making use of hoax notification pop-ups and sites. 

The bottom line: Good security practices up front, solid software and applications, and user awareness would almost eliminate the need for any effort of this type.

Keywords: botnet popups
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OUTAGE: I will be upgrading the server for ISC/DShield later today. Outages should last around 5 minutes.

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