Detecting Conficker

As you know, bad things are going to happen on April 1st: people will be sending out emails to their friends, telling silly jokes and putting MTAs under a higher load. Besides that (but not quite that bad), Conficker will activate its domain name generation routine to contact command-and-control servers. We have been researching this piece of malware recently, with a focus on how to detect Conficker-infected machines. Felix and I had a discussion with Dan Kaminsky about the possibilities to actively detect Conficker and wrote a scanner for this task. Our proof-of-concept code is publicly available and can be downloaded from here. The output looks like this:


./scs.py 127.43.16.76
Could not send SMB request to 127.43.16.76:445/tcp.
./scs.py 127.99.100.2
127.99.100.2 seems to be infected by Conficker.
./scs.py 127.36.15.80
127.36.15.80 seems to be clean.


A windows python to exe build of the same tool is available here. Further, the nature of Conficker’s server service shellcode can be exploited to detect infection attempts. Here are our snort rules we created based on signatures generated with nebula that match the static shellcode:


alert tcp any any -> $HOME_NET 445 (msg: "conficker.a shellcode"; content: "|e8 ff ff ff ff c1|^|8d|N|10 80|1|c4|Af|81|9EPu|f5 ae c6 9d a0|O|85 ea|O|84 c8|O|84 d8|O|c4|O|9c cc|IrX|c4 c4 c4|,|ed c4 c4 c4 94|&

alert tcp any any -> $HOME_NET 445 (msg: "conficker.b shellcode"; content: "|e8 ff ff ff ff c2|_|8d|O|10 80|1|c4|Af|81|9MSu|f5|8|ae c6 9d a0|O|85 ea|O|84 c8|O|84 d8|O|c4|O|9c cc|Ise|c4 c4 c4|,|ed c4 c4 c4 94|&

This shellcode string can even be used with ngrep as a lightweight Conficker IDS:


$ sudo ngrep -qd eth0 -W single -s 900 -X
0xe8ffffffffc25f8d4f108031c4416681394d5375f538aec69da04f85ea4f84c84f84d84fc44f9ccc497365c4c4c42cedc4c4c494263c4f38923bd3574702c32cdcc4c4c4f71696964f08a203c5bcea953bb3c096969592963bf33b24699592514f8ff84f88cfbcc70ff73249d077c795e44fd6c717cbc404cb7b040504c3f6c68644fec4b131ff01b0c282ffb5dcb61f4f95e0c717cb73d0b64f85d8c7074fc054c7079a9d07a4664eb2e244680cb1b6a8a9abaac45de7991dacb0b0b4feebeb
'tcp port 445 and dst net 127.0.208.0/24'


If ngrep detects a matching packet, it prints a line like the following:


88.29.81.25:2238 -> 127.94.208.64:445 [AP] .....SMB%[email protected]\.P.I.P.E.\..............................?..............H.H.D.H.H...1.......1...\.axvmrXmJJVGxhtnmhAVmIJrjFTQDJCvfRwqgxalfTYTObcmhRrDhctYQGlndNZRQxfcAQjRpALmMsUElrvXiQuauTRwyHarfCGDQ......_.O..1.Af.9MSu.8....O..O..O..O.O..Ise...,.....&

Both the scanner and the detection methods can be used to contain Conficker’s impact, and are being integrated into various popular scanning tools right now with the help of the Conficker Working Group. We’ll be providing much more information about detecting, mitigating and  containing Conficker in a new “Know Your Enemey” white paper soon, so call back here for more information.

Tillmann