Alleged Mega-D Botnet Controller Pleads Not Guilty

The man accused of running the Mega-D spam-spewing botnet has pleaded not guilty to charges that he was using the botnet to send millions of spam messages a day, some of them laden with malware. Oleg Nikolaenko was arraigned in U.S. District Court in Wisconsin on Friday on charges that he violate...

Researchers Tracking Emerging Darkness Botnet

Researchers are tracking a new botnet that has become one of the more active DDoS networks on the Internet since its emergence early last month. The botnet, dubbed “Darkness,” is being controlled by several domains hosted in Russia and its operators are boasting that it can take down large sites...

FBI Arrests Alleged Head of Mega-D Botnet Operation

The FBI has arrested the man that they allege is behind the notorious Mega-D botnet, which at one point accounted for nearly a third of all of the spam on the Internet. The arrest came to light this week after the man was caught entering the U.S. last month on his way to a car show. The man that...

Report: IRC Botnets Dying…But Not Dead

Once the most common form of malicious computer network, botnets that use the IRC Internet Relay Chat protocol are going the way of the Brontosaurus, according to a report from Internet security monitoring firm Team Cymru. Under fire from better monitoring of IRC command and control C&C traffic a...

China Introduces New Laws to Combat Cyber Hacking

China is taking decisive action against computer hacking with a new law set to govern the sentencing of hackers and other internet offenders. This initiative, announced by the Ministry of Public Security, aims to enhance cybersecurity in response to the growing threat of cybercrime. Lawmakers are...

zScaler: Resurgent Lethic using Stuxnet Tricks

Newly detected versions of the Lethic botnet are digitally signed using stolen credentials similar to those used by the Stuxnet worm, according to a blog post from Web security firm zScaler. In a blog post Wednesday, zScaler Senior Security Researcher Mike Geide said the company had intercepted n...

Botnet Crackdowns Staunch Spam…For a Month

The crackdowns on massive, spam-spewing botnets disrupted the global flow of spam e-mail…for about a month. That, according to a new report out from Kaspersky Lab. “Spam in the Third Quarter of 2010” is the latest, quarterly report from Kaspersky’s anti virus research labs. It finds that several...

Researchers To Debut Botnet-Resistant Coding Techniques

As the botnet epidemic continues to rage, researchers are expanding the scope of their search for new methods to prevent users from becoming unwitting victims of these massive malicious networks. One pair of researchers this week will unveil a new technique they’ve developed to help Web sites...

Attackers Now Using Honeypots to Trap Researchers

Attackers are constantly changing their tactics and adapting to what the security community and researchers are doing, and it’s not unusual for the bad guys to adopt techniques used by their adversaries. The latest example of this is a malware gang that has deployed what amounts to a honeypot...

Indian hackers focus on botnet attacks

A new report released by computer giant Microsoft has revealed that the attack of 'botnets' on computers has increased in India. A botnet is a network of computers, controlled by one computer bot herder, which attacks another PC and makes it a part of its network. The report says that the Indian...

Report Alleges Bredolab-Spamit Connections

Law enforcement crackdowns in recent weeks have targeted two major contributors to worldwide spam: Spamit.com and the Bredolab botnet. Now a new report suggests that the two cases may be related. A report on Krebsonsecurity.com claims that the recent arrest of a 27 year-old man, identified as Geo...

Firm Scores $29M for Anti Botnet-As-A-Service

Endgame Systems is expanding from the government sector to commercial anti botnet services with a $29 million investment. The headlines in recent months have been filled with news about busts of major botnet operations – Bredolab, Pushdo, Waldec and Mariposa among them. But botnets are still a...

Bredolab Botnet Crackdown Could Have Wide Impact

A Dutch cyber crime unit has disrupted the operation of the Bredolab botnet and arrested an Armenian man believed to be the operator of the global malware distribution hub. In a statement on Monday, the Dutch Public Ministry said that the country’s High Tech Crime Team THTC, working in cooperatio...

U.S. Reigns As Most Bot-Infected Country

The U.S. has by far the highest number of bot-infected computers of any country in the world, with nearly four times as many infected PCs as the country in second place, Brazil, according to a new report by Microsoft. The quarterly report on malicious software and Internet attacks shows that whil...

Spam Volume Is Way Down…But Why?

The volume of spam e-mail is down…way down. That’s the good news. But experts aren’t exactly sure what’s caused the precipitous drop in spam e-mail or how long it will last. As Brian Krebs reports on his blog, mail security firm M86 is seeing a 40% decline in spam volume since the beginning of...

Gaps In International Cyber Law Could Hamper Mariposa Case

ED: Gaps in international cyber law could hamper Mariposa case DEK: The take down of the Mariposa botnet is a cyber law enforcement success story – but gaps in international cyber law could make it difficult to prosecute those behind the botnet. A researcher involved in the analysis and dismantli...

LinkedIn Members Targeted by Botnet Malware

Members of LinkedIn who clicked on fake connection requests sent users to a Website that displayed “PLEASE WAITING…4 SECONDS” before redirecting them to Google. During those 4 seconds, the Website downloaded Zeus data-theft malware onto their PCs. Read the full article. eWEEK...

Zeus Botnet Raids Result in 19 UK Arrests

UK police have arrested 19 cybercrime suspects who allegedly used the ZeuS crimeware toolkit to capture online banking credentials before looting victims’ bank accounts. Read the full article. The Register...

Researcher Finds Infiltration Flaw in Zeus Botnet

A security researcher has discovered a potentially crippling vulnerability in one of the most widely used botnet toolkits, a finding that makes it easy for blackhats and whitehats alike to take control of huge networks of infected PCs. Read the full article. The Register...

My Opera Found To Host Malware

HED: MyOpera found to host malware BAK: The My Opera free Web hosting service is hosting malicious code, just the latest prominent hosting service to be gamed by malware distributors. Less than a month after Google’s Code hosting service was found to be hosting and serving malicious executables, ...