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__________________________________________________________ The U.S. Department of Energy Computer Incident Advisory Center ___ __ __ _ ___ / | /_\ / \___ __|__ / \ \___ __________________________________________________________ ADVISORY NOTICE The W32.nimda Worm September 19, 2001 00:00 GMT Number L-144 ______________________________________________________________________________ PROBLEM: An extremely virulent worm is currently spreading throughout the Internet. It uses multiple methods of infection to spread among both Windows server and user machines. PLATFORM: All Windows platforms including IIS servers and client systems using web browsers and html enabled mail readers. Of particular risk are home users who use the html enabled web browsers with Javascript enabled. DAMAGE: Compromised machines will attack other machines on the Internet. Files may be damaged. Network resources will be used which will slow the Internet. SOLUTION: Apply patches to uninfected systems, specifically Microsoft patches MS01-044 and MS01-020. MS01-044 patches IIS servers to prevent them from being compromised. The MS01-020 patch protects client browsers and mail readers based on the Internet Explorer browser. Compromised machines must be pulled off of the Internet and rebuilt or cleaned with antivirus software as it becomes available. Note: Rebooting will not clean your system of this worm. ______________________________________________________________________________ VULNERABILITY The risk is HIGH. The worm is rapidly spreading throughout the ASSESSMENT: Internet. ______________________________________________________________________________ LINKS: CIAC BULLETIN: http://www.ciac.org/ciac/bulletins/l-044.shtml PATCHES: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms01-044 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms01-020 ______________________________________________________________________________ The W32.nimda worm is still being analyzed but we currently see a spread via e-mail, web pages, and attacks on vulnerable web servers. Web servers are attacked using multiple, known vulnerabilities such as unicode and directory traversal. All of these can be patched with the MS01-044 patch set available from Microsoft. Client systems are attacked by simply opening infected mail or accessing infected web pages. The vulnerability exploited is that closed by the MS01-020 patch from Microsoft. The worm also spreads by open shares between Windows machines. Infected mail messages contain an attachment named readme.exe. IIS web servers retrieve admin.dll using tftp. Admin.dll is the same program as readme.exe. Unique strings detected in the executables and the mail message includes the following. boundary="====_ABC1234567890DEF_====" X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Unsent: 1 --====_ABC1234567890DEF_==== Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="====_ABC0987654321DEF_====" --====_ABC0987654321DEF_==== Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable <HTML><HEAD></HEAD><BODY bgColor=3D#ffffff> <iframe src=3Dcid:EA4DMGBP9p height=3D0 width=3D0> </iframe></BODY></HTML> --====_ABC0987654321DEF_====-- --====_ABC1234567890DEF_==== Content-Type: audio/x-wav; name="readme.exe" Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 Content-ID: <EA4DMGBP9p> Antivirus vendors are making scanning and cleaning software available. We will revise this bulletin as more information becomes available. ______________________________________________________________________________ CIAC, the Computer Incident Advisory Center, is the computer security incident response team for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the emergency backup response team for the National Institutes of Health (NIH). CIAC is located at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California. CIAC is also a founding member of FIRST, the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams, a global organization established to foster cooperation and coordination among computer security teams worldwide. CIAC services are available to DOE, DOE contractors, and the NIH. CIAC can be contacted at: Voice: +1 925-422-8193 (7x24) FAX: +1 925-423-8002 STU-III: +1 925-423-2604 E-mail: ciac@ciac.org Previous CIAC notices, anti-virus software, and other information are available from the CIAC Computer Security Archive. World Wide Web: http://www.ciac.org/ Anonymous FTP: ftp.ciac.org PLEASE NOTE: Many users outside of the DOE, ESnet, and NIH computing communities receive CIAC bulletins. If you are not part of these communities, please contact your agency's response team to report incidents. Your agency's team will coordinate with CIAC. The Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST) is a world-wide organization. A list of FIRST member organizations and their constituencies can be obtained via WWW at http://www.first.org/. This document was prepared as an account of work sponsored by an agency of the United States Government. Neither the United States Government nor the University of California nor any of their employees, makes any warranty, express or implied, or assumes any legal liability or responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information, apparatus, product, or process disclosed, or represents that its use would not infringe privately owned rights. Reference herein to any specific commercial products, process, or service by trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise, does not necessarily constitute or imply its endorsement, recommendation or favoring by the United States Government or the University of California. The views and opinions of authors expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the United States Government or the University of California, and shall not be used for advertising or product endorsement purposes. LAST 10 CIAC BULLETINS ISSUED (Previous bulletins available from CIAC) L-134: HP Security Vulnerability in rlpdaemon L-135: SGI File Globbing Vulnerability in ftpd L-136: HP-UX Security Vulnerability in PRM L-137: FreeBSD lpd Remote Root Vulnerability L-138: Gauntlet Firewall CSMAP and smap/smapd Buffer Overflow Vulnerability L-139: Microsoft IIS "%u encoding IDS bypass vulnerability" L-140: Gauntlet Firewall CSMAP and smap/smapd Buffer Overflow Vulnerability L-141: RSA BSAFE SSL-J 3.x Vulnerability L-142: RPC Endpoint Mapper Vulnerability L-143: HP libsecurity Vulnerability