DDoS Extortionists Offer 'Discount' Competitor Attacks

One of the most novel approaches for acquiring new botnet clients is a weird combination consisting of direct DDoS extortion, followed by penalties for delayed response and the offering of 30% discount in case the victim wants to DDoS the competition once the ransom is paid. Read the full article...

New, Simple Twitter Botnet Tool Debuts

There is a new point-and-click tool circulating online that enables virtually anyone to create a piece of malware that will connect a PC to a budding Twitter botnet. The tool, known as TwitterNET Builder, is being used by attackers to build quick and easy botnets that are then controlled through...

Botnet Herder PROXIEZ Goes Offline

One of the internet’s most resilient and crimeware-friendly networks PROXIEZ-NET was knocked offline after the plug was pulled on its upstream service provider, security watchers said. Read the full article. The Register...

Botnet Herders Can Command Via Twitter

A security researcher has unearthed a tool that simplifies the process of building bot armies that take their marching orders from specially created Twitter accounts. Read the full article. The Register...

Gumblar Botnet Shifts Tactics

The criminals behind the Gumblar botnet and malware campaign have been adapting their techniques, as attackers are wont to do, in order not only to evade detection but to prevent researchers from downloading and analyzing new versions of the malware. A new analysis of the recent activity by Gumbl...

Mariposa Botnet Suspects Desired Security Jobs

Two of the accused Mariposa botnet operators in Spain requested jobs at Panda Security in March some 2 months after their arrest, according to a Panda Security official. Read the full article. KrebsonSecurity...

Which is the Real ZeuS Botnet?

By Roel Schouwenberg, Kaspersky Lab Amongst some others the Zeus bot is one of the most prolific bots in the wild and in the media. Lately there has been quite a few reports on the aspects surrounding Zeus, such as new research and the Troyak takedown. Naturally, this is great news. However,...

New Storm Variant Merely a Spambot, Experts Say

The new piece of malware that surfaced this week and has been hailed as a return of the Storm worm, is in fact simply the worm’s original spam engine with some new components wrapped around it, researchers say, and not a rebirth of the botnet itself. Storm was a major botnet threat during its...

Custom Botnet-For-Hire Builder to Plead Guilty

A Mesquite, Texas, man is set to plead guilty to training his 22,000-PC botnet on a local ISP — just to show off its firepower to a potential customer. David Anthony Edwards will plead guilty to charges that he and another man, Thomas James Frederick Smith, built a custom botnet, called Nettick,...

New Storm Botnet Variant Making Spam

Security watcherssay they’ve spotted a new botnet that bears the hallmarks of Storm and is sending out a “massive volume of spam emails to targeted recipients.” Read the full article. The Register...

Advertising Losses Mount in Botnet Click Fraud

The clever hacking of online advertisements has quietly grown into a multi-million dollar criminal industry showing no signs of slowing. The big losers: online advertisers. Read the full article. The Last Watchdog...

New Zeus Botnet Variant Targets Firefox

A new version of the data-stealing trojan Zeus is for the first time able to successfully exploit Mozilla’s Firefox browser to commit sophisticated online banking fraud. Read the full article. Secure Computing...

Zeus Botnet Exploiting PDF Flaw

The Zeus botnet is now using an unpatched flaw in Adobe’s PDF document format to infect users with malicious code, said security researchers. Read the full article. Computerworld...

New P2P Botnet Forming

Security researchers have identified a newly formed botnet that comprises machines infected with a Trojan specifically designed to manage the downloading and installation of a spectrum of other malicious software. The Trojan, known as Heloag, installs itself on PCs after being downloaded from one...

Spyware Botnet 'GhostNet' Uses The Cloud

Espionage network GhostNet, first identified about a year ago, is much larger and more sophisticated than previously assumed according to a study entitled “Shadows in the Cloud”, by the Munk Centre for International Studies, the Information Warfare Monitor, the SecDev Group and the Shadowserver...

DHS Studying Global Response to Conficker Botnet

One year after the Conficker botnet was front-page news around the world, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is preparing a report looking at the worldwide effort to keep it in check. The report, to be published within the month, shows how an ad hoc group of security researchers and Interne...

Remember Aurora–and Other Botnets

Last night my attention was drawn to a couple of blog entries relating to Google and the attacks they fell victim to earlier this year. These attacks were eventually labeled as “Operation Aurora” by McAfee based upon the presence of the “aurora” keyword embedded within some of the malware. First...

MS Live CAPTCHAS Busted by PushDo Botnet

The prolific Pushdo spam botnet has found a new way to penetrate Microsoft’s Live.com by exploiting weaknesses in the audio captchas designed to prevent automated scripts from accessing the popular email service. Read the full article. The Register...

Researcher Who Helped Take Down Waledac Talks Crimeware

Thorsten Holz, researcher at Vienna University of Technology, whose team not only participated in the recent takedown of the Waledac botnet, but released an interesting paper earlier this year, summarizing their findings based on 33GB of crimeware data obtained from active campaigns talks to Danc...

What Researchers Are Gaining from Troyak's De-Peering

Over the past week, security researchers and vendors have been playing a cat-and-mouse game with a cybercrime-friendly ISP known as TROYAK-AS. The results so far? A series of attempts by the cybercriminals to restore access to their botnet, and an invaluable learning experience for the community,...