Kaspersky researcher cracks Flame malware password

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2012/091812-kaspersky-flame-262531.html

by headShrinker • 14 years ago

132 63 14 years ago

networkworld.com

xal• 14 years ago

> The hash - 27934e96d90d06818674b98bec7230fa - was resolved to the plain text password 900gage!@# by Bestuzhev.

What? How did they crack this if brute force failed? That's scary as hell.

ck2• 14 years ago

That has got to be one impossible rainbow table.

More likely they used a table of known existing passwords and variations on the them?

taw9• 14 years ago

... maybe the FSB let them borrow one?

andrewcooke2• 14 years ago

there are crackers that work with templates, so that they reduce the amount of space to search. the trick is to have good templates. for example, in this case, they probably had a template that was 3 digits, 4 lower-case letters, 3 symbols. the idea being that people are more likely to do that than 9#gag0e!0@, for example.

so it's a combination of luck, computing power (they probably have a farm of gpus), and careful selection of templates (probably guided by analysis of known passwords).

bcoates4• 14 years ago

It's not just that template, it's an "obvious" 3 digit number, a 4 letter dictionary word, and "123" with shift held down. If you had some sort of statistical password ordering it wouldn't be that far down the list.

shawndellysse• 14 years ago

Kapersky cracked it. Symantic said brute force failed. That confused me for a second also.

Steko2• 14 years ago

I think they just googled the hash, see my post above.

miles4• 14 years ago

Not only that: "Kaspersky analyst Dmitry Bestuzhev cracked the hash for the password Sept. 17 just hours after Symantec put out a public request for help"

How is it possible to crack 900gage!@# in a few hours?

forgotusername2• 14 years ago

AV companies like to share samples with each other, so guessing they had at least a bit of a head start. Still, brute forcing a 10 character password that uses the full ASCII printable character set looks like it'd require.. 9,500 years on a single high end GPU.

No idea what the current state of cracking is, but probably they used some rules based approach (like John the Ripper used to have) to massively reduce the search space.

moxie2• 14 years ago

I run cloudcracker.com, which would have gotten this pretty quickly.

If you look at public password compromises, the components of this password "900", "gage", and "!@#" each appear pretty frequently. So using a data-driven approach to build context free grammars based on real-world passwords you've found or already cracked will get passwords like this every time.

Basically, everyone thinks they're clever when they choose a password, but for the most part people are all being "clever" in the same way. If you think up your password, chances are you've lost.

WestCoastJustin3• 14 years ago

Unreal that he was able to crack it so fast.. a little scary really! He might have access to precomputed password hashes in a database. For example, you create a massive password list and compute all the hashes, save them in a database, why would you compute these hashes and throw away the results each time. You might just say "select plain_text from results where hash = '27934e96d90d06818674b98bec7230fa';". Just a guess though.

revelation• 14 years ago

It's called a rainbow table, and it would be gigantic for 10 character strings with special characters considered.

jayfuerstenberg• 14 years ago

The article neglects to mention what is perhaps the most important element of this story: the hashing algorithm used.

Cracking a hashed algorithm computed in SHA-512 or even BCrypt is a different story from MD5.

WestCoastJustin3• 14 years ago

PDF report by symantec of how the C&C was configured and how it works: http://www.symantec.com/content/en/us/enterprise/media/secur...

Full Analysis of Flame's Command & Control servers by Kaspersky Lab Expert http://www.securelist.com/en/blog/750/Full_Analysis_of_Flame...

vinhboy• 14 years ago

I find it really interesting that this is all done in a simple LAMP stack. And they made a bunch of mistakes in their code.

Steko2• 14 years ago

So I guess this was a previously cracked MD5 hash, 6th result below:

http://www.google.com/search?q=900gage!%40%23&hl=en&...

{restricted date to before a few days ago}

bcoates4• 14 years ago

Google's web search by date works by parsing dates on pages, not by loading actual historical search data, so it's possible to backdate information with it.

emmelaich2• 14 years ago

I guess you're referring to OnlineHashCrack.com.

Google search result says that that appeared on 21 Nov 2010.

See it here from google's cache: http://goo.gl/Yctw3

madsravn• 14 years ago

Breaking a password and then forcing access to the server - isn't that illegal regardless of who does it?

gknoy• 14 years ago

I imagine that someone would have to come forward to complain that it was unauthorized access. I doubt anyone wants to claim to be running a botnet.

insertnickname• 14 years ago

This reminds me of the story about the guy who called the police because he had his weed stolen from him I read in a local paper recently.

luu• 14 years ago

Do people still think this was created by the NSA? It seems extraordinarily unlikely that they would use such a weak password, one that you would expect to fall to a rules based engine. The only way I could even imagine that happening is as a bit of misdirection, and there must surely be misdirection you can do that doesn't compromise your security.

WestCoastJustin3• 14 years ago

It was reported in the nytimes that this is indeed a cyberweapons [1].

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/middleeast/obama-ord...

danielweber• 14 years ago

That article doesn't seem to say that. It's suspected but the US has denied it.

Who the heck lives at 900 Gage Road, though?

drivebyacct2• 14 years ago

Am I right in reading the Symantec C&C report and seeing that the servers were on Linux machines? Were the hiding the activity from themselves in case they were compromised? I assumed that they were infecting machines and using them as servers. Was there a linux vulnerability too?

superuser2• 14 years ago

How did Kaspersky get the hash?

YZF2• 14 years ago

They got access to the server through some other undisclosed means, the hash was there.

YZF2• 14 years ago

How much anonymity does this scheme buy you? If the server is discovered presumably traffic can be traced back to its operators, no?

ianhawes• 14 years ago

Presumably, the operators accessing it are using other compromised servers as proxies to connect to the C&C servers. Their initial connection from HQ is probably to an overseas VPN that has been setup by an IC shell company (shell being a front, not computer shell).

wahsd• 14 years ago

With enough investigation all of that could be tracked and disclosed. It is not impossible to track the origins of either methods of obfuscation if one is determined. Not that it's relevant because it was essentially already admitted that it was a US operation, possibly/probably in collaboration with Israelis; but that was basically obvious to all but the naive from the get-go.

TomAnthony• 14 years ago

Did I miss something? The C&C servers are still online and running?

Kaspersky researcher cracks Flame malware password

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