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Botnet using Plesk vulnerability and takedown

Today while investigating the Plesk/Apache Remote Code Execution vulnerability disclosed by Kingcope, we uncovered what appeared to be a sizeable botnet leveraging this vulnerability to infect webservers with a malicious IRC bot written in Perl; a loosely modified version of a publicly known tool. A sample of the aforementioned bot has been attached. We analysed the bot sample, and we discovered it was connecting to an IRC server at [redacted].no-ip.biz, which appeared to redirect to a compromised host in the 118.97.x.x range. The IRC server on this host refused our attempts to connect to it, claiming its connection limit had been exceeded. However, the server was vulnerable to an exploit (which Kingcope has also released a PoC for) that has been used widely to compromise hosts in the wild. We made use of this vulnerability to gain privileged access to the C&C server. After doing so, we monitored attempts to connect to the IRCd for several hours, while performing forensics. A large list of hosts believed to be infected was generated from the data gathered, and probed in an automated fashion for vulnerable Plesk installations. Over 900 hosts attempting to connect were running vulnerable Plesk installations, confirming our suspicion that the Plesk exploit was how this malware was spreading; based on our estimates, about 40 hosts were being infected an hour, which we found intolerable. A tool to disinfect the compromised hosts was then written, along with a tool that automatically used the Plesk exploit to upload and execute the removal script. Both of these are attached. We ran our tools, the bots were purged from all infected hosts, and the internet became a safer place for children. It's likely that other, similar botnets will be developed, which is the reason for this post; please feel free to make use out of our scripts to handle any similar outbreaks. Best Regards, jtag & `0 RepoCERT, Your Botnet Repossession Agency.

Attachment: ircbot.pl

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Attachment: botslayer.py

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Attachment: clean.pl

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