Microsoft Cybercrime Shutdown Hit Users Says DDNS Provider

Who made Microsoft the Internet police?

I get really irritated with companies that put absolutely no effort into cleaning up their services on their own. When nearly 20,000 of No-IP's accounts are being used for malicious purposes, crying about how Microsoft didn't give them any warning just makes them seem incompetent. There was another article recently on HN about some free tunneling service whose creator tried to automate account shutdowns whenever his ISP sent a complaint letter, which I found to be similarly annoying -- these services are essentially forcing other companies to spend money to do the work that they themselves should be doing.

IMO No-IP is responsible for its legitimate customers' outages. Waiting around for other companies to do your job for you will result in ham-handed solutions like this one.

And how is No-IP supposed to find these malware hosts? Seems to me like they'd have less capability to do so than an antivirus company that collects thousands if not millions of malware samples each day.

This is even more ridiculous than I thought, given TFA -- Microsoft could have just asked them to change the IP associated with the relevant accounts, disable update for them and/or hand over access to those accounts.

To quote myself from the other thread, the approach they did take is more than slightly bizarre:

"There are serious problems with this, firstly that it's technically impossible to implement effectively, beyond that it's extremely impractical. Any benefit will be so so transient as to render the entire exercise pointless.

For the moment, let us ignore the scary implications of the court's part in this and consider this from a technical perspective in a logical manner:

The hypothetical sub-domain abc.no-ip.org resolves to 1.2.3.4, a host somewhere that contains malicious payloads, is botnet C&C or is a member of a botnet. In any case, he's the bad guy - one of the people Microsoft are looking to exclude from the Internet.

So how can this be accomplished? Let's ignore for the moment that the bad guys are free to use any other dyndns service they please and assume that no-ip is the only one.

Approach 1

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Every time a host connects to no-ip to update its IP, Microsoft scans tcp & udp ports of the host looking for known C&C services, scans hosted data (public web or ftp). This will simply result in the bad guys hiding all of this in an undetectable manner, many bot-nets already use either Tor or SSH for C&C - without authentication it will be impossible to differentiate Joe Average with an SSH or Tor exit from the "targets".

As for scanning for content, this is possible assuming the content has to be public (ie. malicious payload) but even then, it's not practical - payloads can be hidden in anything and obfuscated beyond detection. Essentially all that's accomplished is another arms race based around signature detection for malicious content, with the disadvantage that unlike AV solutions this scanning is conducted remotely and the scan source is known. So the malicious guy with 2 or three lines just uses a stateful firewall to point microsoft's "scanning service" to good content, everyone else to the bad.

So what other options are there? A blacklist of IPs? Well, they're dynamic IPs, sooner or later you'll end up with every dynamic IP in the entire ipv4 range blacklisted as the bad dudes just release/renew.

Then there's banning the sub-domains/users! Also impractical because for each user and domain you ban, another will emerge.

Approach 2

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Microsoft resolves every request for abc.no-ip.org to their own service, all the time, this service performs stateful packet analysis before forwarding it on to the destination host. Impractical because you're essentially routing all no-ip traffic via Microsoft and once again you can only filter what you can detect -- and once the requests themselves are encrypted, that becomes impossible. This is effectively a MITM attack.

All the while we've assumed no-ip is the only alternative, it's not - and many others are beyond Microsoft and the courts jurisdiction. So ultimately the only way this "approach" could be temporarily feasible is if all Internet traffic were routed through Microsoft's service. So effectively you need to give control of every domain, TLD, ipv4 and ipv6 range to Microsoft. Not workable.

Someone is bound to point out that Microsoft's approach in this may be distributed, agents running on installs of their operating system which does address some aspects of my points above, but once again -- if Microsoft is capable of implementing effective detection on the workstation, remind me again why any of this is needed?

I must be missing something fundamental."

Lets be honest about the problem and this isn't some slashdot-esque rant:

a) Windows is a piece of crap when it comes to staying clean. If it wasn't, Microsoft wouldn't have to go after people like this. Not joking but I clean out a fair number of PCs every year and they are crawling with malware.

b) Users are dumb and install any old crap on kit if prompted to. Microsoft's SmartScreen did very little to prevent this.

In the fallout from this, people are getting hurt. End users are getting their PCs and data stuffed and companies like this lose their reputation and business because they are a convenient mule (as are the end users) for malware pushers who's job has been made easy.

And don't give me the crap about probability based on the sheer number of windows machines or the plain bullshit security statistics. They're a pretty easy target as the architecture of Windows is incredibly complicated and they're playing plug the holes rather than designing it properly to start with. For ref, I know the NT kernel, win32 and CLR inside out and no longer would I poke it with a stick.

So, there's nothing here that's unique to no-ip.com's case. The problem is that Microsoft spewed out crap for years and people are suffering because the only way they can contain it is to scorch the earth.