Home | What's New | FAQ | Site Contents | Contact Us | SEARCH |
About Us | Alerts | Events | Improving Security | Other Resources | Reports | Survivability Research | Training and Education |
CERT® Incident Note IN-2000-03The CERT Coordination Center publishes incident notes to provide information about incidents to the Internet community. 911 WormDate: April 4, 2000OverviewA worm with variants known as "chode," "foreskin," "dickhair", "firkin," or "911" has received some attention over the last week. The National Infrastructure Protection Center issued a bulletin regarding this worm, available at This worm spreads by taking advantage of unprotected Windows shares. For more information on a similar problem and relevant solutions, please see
Description
The "chode" worm affects Windows 98 systems with unprotected shares. It does not function properly on Windows NT systems. We have not completed testing on Windows 95 systems or Windows 2000 systems. As of this writing, CERT/CC has not received any direct reports of systems infected with this worm, though we have received a small number of second-hand reports. The worm consists of several batch files, and it takes the following steps. CHODE.BAT calls RANDOM.BAT, which picks a target network and initial host from a set of predefined networks. Once RANDOM.BAT picks an initial machine, CHODE.BAT increments over the addresses, and for each address it
If it maps C and finds win.com, it then
If chode is not found, it begins the process of trying to infect/replicate. It
If the copy is successful, it
It then selects a random number based on the time. During this process, it creates a file called "cu##ent.bat", a file called "current.bat", and an environment variable called "time". Based on the random number, it appends a file named "chocher.bat" to autoexec.bat with probability 1/10. The new autoexec.bat (with chocher.bat appended) then
Chode then copies ashield.pif, netstat.pif, and winsock.vbs to the startup folder on the victim machine. When Windows next starts on the victim machine, these files begin the process again. The winsock.vbs file then deletes all files on the C drive on the 19th day of the month. The initiating machine then starts again with a new IP address. We encourage you to read CERT Incident Note IN-2000-02 for information on general solutions to the problem of unprotected Windows shares. One notable variant (foreskin) of the worm described in this document randomly copies one of a set of batch files (named A.BAT, B.BAT, C.BAT...J.DAT) to a file called MSTUM.BAT. Other variants named dickhair and firkin are similar. Other informationAdditional information about this and similar viruses and worms is available at
Author: Shawn Hernan This document is available from: http://www.cert.org/incident_notes/IN-2000-03.html CERT/CC Contact Information
Phone: +1 412-268-7090 (24-hour hotline) Fax: +1 412-268-6989 Postal address:
Using encryptionWe strongly urge you to encrypt sensitive information sent by email. Our public PGP key is available from If you prefer to use DES, please call the CERT hotline for more information.
Getting security informationCERT publications and other security information are available from our web siteTo subscribe to the CERT mailing list for advisories and bulletins, send email to [email protected]. Please include in the body of your message subscribe cert-advisory * "CERT" and "CERT Coordination Center" are registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
NO WARRANTY Any material furnished by Carnegie Mellon University and the Software Engineering Institute is furnished on an "as is" basis. Carnegie Mellon University makes no warranties of any kind, either expressed or implied as to any matter including, but not limited to, warranty of fitness for a particular purpose or merchantability, exclusivity or results obtained from use of the material. Carnegie Mellon University does not make any warranty of any kind with respect to freedom from patent, trademark, or copyright infringement. Conditions for use, disclaimers, and sponsorship information
Copyright 2000 Carnegie Mellon University. |