After 23 years of operation, the Sality peer-to-peer (P2P) botnet has been disrupted as part of an international law enforcement effort.
First observed in 2003, Sality has been used for distributing various malware families, including information stealers, proxy services, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) payloads, and more.
For the past eight years, it mainly served the EggJagger clipjacking tool, which is believed to have stolen at least $150,000 in Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Sality remained active due to its architecture: it spread through a file infector, attaching itself to executables on disk and removable media, and did not rely on a central command-and-control (C&C) server for receiving code updates.
The protocol behavior that allowed the botnet to persist for over 20 years was also the weakness that led to its demise: it blindly trusted the peers on the network, without authentication or identity verification.
Sality bots periodically checked if the peers in their list of super peers (infected machines forming the backbone of the P2P network) were accessible. Those that were online built reputation, while those offline lost it and were eventually purged.
Exploiting this behavior, CrowdStrike performed protocol-level manipulation of the list, removing the super peer entries to progressively isolate infected machines, while injecting sinkholes into the list.
Coordinating with CrowdStrike’s bot isolation and P2P network sinkholing, law enforcement in the US, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania took down the URLs hosting Sality payloads, ensuring that the infected machines would not receive new payloads.
“The criminal behind Sality has lost the ability to communicate with infected machines. The disruption operation isolates all peers in the network from their control. […] All Sality-infected machines now beacon to CrowdStrike-operated sinkholes,” CrowdStrike notes.
As part of the disruption effort, The Shadowserver Foundation is working with ISPs and CSIRTs to identify botnet victims and clean up the infections.
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