Santy updates – worm renamed

We’ve decided to rename Santy.d and Santy.e to Spyki.a and b. We are doing this because:

A deeper analysis of the new worm that we detected at the weekend, which seemed to be a new version of Santy, shows that it’s different to Santy. The most important difference is that it doesn’t exploit vulnerable versions of phpBB to spread. It attacks any vulnerability which contains the ‘Remote file inclusion’ vulnerability. So the problem is that this vulnerability isn’t connected with which version of PHP is installed on the server – it happens because of errors in programming PHP pages.

Once the worm penetrates the server, it uploads Backdoor.Perl.Shellbot.a – also written in Perl. This backdoor connects with certain IRC channels to receive and execute commands from its author/ user.

The new worm uses the Brazilian Google server for search requests, and includes the copyright of the Brazil hacker group ‘Atrix Team’ – it seems that this group probably wrote the new worm.

We recommend everyone using PHP for web page programming to check their servers for errors. A description of the errors is here