RE: Strange servicepack.exe file (not service.exe) found.

From: Harlan Carvey (keydet89_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 12/18/03

  • Next message: John Ives: "RE: Strange servicepack.exe file (not service.exe) found."
    Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 16:20:03 -0800 (PST)
    To: incidents@securityfocus.com
    
    

    James,

    > To be fair to the original poster, in hindsight
    > there was reasonable
    > association from other posts between the suspect
    > file and some complex
    > adware that downloads arbitrary additional
    > components and takes aggressive
    > actions like installing porno dialers similar to
    > what was found.

    You're mixing terminology. In my experience, and I do
    have quite a bit of experience w/ adware and spyware,
    these things are annoying, yes, but hardly aggressive.
     And complex is being...well...generous.

    I saw the response from Symantec on the item. I also
    downloaded the file, and scanned it with the most
    recent defs for NAV...and got nothing.

    > Rebuilding
    > might take less than an hour, while investigation
    > and cleanup might take a little more.

    The short term fix may be preferable...but investing a
    little bit of time in determining the initial
    "infection" vector might save a good deal of time in
    "cleaning up" other systems.
     
    > Recovery takes less skill and often less time than
    > forensics. That makes it
    > a positive thing provided one investigated enough to
    > know that recovery
    > eliminates any damage that might have occurred.

    Hhhmmm...again, perhaps in the short term - but not in
    the long run.
     
    > The downside as you say is one will never know. The
    > "infection" vector might
    > not be determined until it happens again. And it
    > would sure be nice to know
    > if the afflicted (if not infected) machine was
    > trying to do anything to the
    > rest of the network or if it was communicating
    > outside the LAN.

    And to be quite honest, it doesn't really take a great
    deal of time or skill to do these things. It simply
    takes a bit of time invested in learning to do it.
     
    > It is important to know what the machine did while
    > it was in a suspect
    > state, if possible. The rebuild doesn't help enough
    > if, for example, network
    > passwords were compromised.

    Very true.
     
    > Plus it would really be silly if machine gets
    > rebuilt when a reboot might
    > have sufficed.

    Yep. However, I believe that the argument amongst
    Windows admins will continue to favor rebuilding will
    continue for the time being...however unfortunate that
    may be.

    Harlan

    Harlan

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  • Next message: John Ives: "RE: Strange servicepack.exe file (not service.exe) found."

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