EarthStation 5 P2P application contains malicious code

[skiabox]

>

ES5 info 
-------- 
EarthStation 5 (aka ES5, aka ESV) (h**p://www.earthstation5.com and 
h**p://forums2.es5.com/) is a P2P application first released about 6-12 
months ago. The people behind ES5 claim that ES5 is the most secure P2P 
software in the world. They also claim that they are security experts, and 
that they have more than 15 million simultaneous users on-line 24/7. In 
comparison Kazaa, the most popular P2P application, only has about 4 
million simultaneous users on-line at any given time of day. 

Malicious code 
-------------- 
There exists malicious code in ES5.exe's "Search Service" packet handler. 
By sending packet 0Ch, sub-function 07h to the "Search Service"'s IP:Port, 
a remote attacker could delete any file the user is sharing. If the remote 
attacker uses "filenames" with a relative path in them (eg. 
"..\..\..\WINDOWS\NOTEPAD.EXE"), the remote attacker could also delete 
files in eg. the windows and windows\system32 folders, or any other folder 
on the same partition as any of the shared folders. Since most users using 
Windows are in the Administrators group, a remote attacker could also 
delete the C:\BOOT.INI file which is a required boot file used by ntldr. 

IMPORTANT: This is not a bug! They intentionally added this code to ES5. 

Vulnerabilities 
--------------- 
There also exists a lot of other vulnerabilities in ES5 (eg. DoS attacks, 
buffer overflow bugs, and so on), but these all seem to be unintentional. 
Another advisory may have more info on these vulnerabilities, but I'm not 
their beta tester so don't hold your breath. 

Conclusion 
---------- 
The people behind ES5 have intentionally added malicious code to ES5. If 
you have followed the ES5 discussions on message boards and read what the 
ES5 people have said and done (eg. DoS attacking BitTorrent sites), this 
comes as no surprise. The question then is "why did they do it?" I'm sure 
they won't tell us, but here's a theory: They could be working for the 
RIAA, MPAA, or a similar organization. Once they have enough users on their 
ES5 network, they would start deleting all copyrighted files they own which 
their users are sharing. The users wouldn't know what hit them. 

Tested ES5 builds 
----------------- 
ES5 build 1266 
ES5 build 2180 (latest version) 

MD5 sums of files 
----------------- 
MD5 sum (using RFC 1321 source code) of tested files (just in case the ES5 
people will remove the malicious code w/o changing the build number) 

e35838ef6668abe883344e3a7e734794 *es5beta1266.exe 
ce44a1f0542b9132f2debd9866febc65 *es5beta2180.exe 
373c30ba0e8b1dce05dcab2acce94a77 *es5_build1266.exe 
915de0f8e72be40bf071a86bc9dc2626 *es5_build2180.exe 

2,244,663 es5_build1266.exe (ES5.exe - build 1266) 
2,347,063 es5_build2180.exe (ES5.exe - build 2180 - latest version) 
4,436,309 es5beta1266.exe (ES5 installer - build 1266) 
4,553,325 es5beta2180.exe (ES5 installer - build 2180 - latest version) 

The official ES5 installer download URL is 
h**p://download.es5.com/es5beta.exe , but check its MD5 sum before 
installing it in case they changed it.

 

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