Eugene Kaspersky: Conficker could have been much worse

From CNet News Liam Tung Cybercrime fighter Eugene Kaspersky can’t help but be impressed by the slick operations behind the Conficker botnet, and says that it could have been worse had the botnet been after more than just money. “They are high-end engineers who write code in a good way,” Kaspersk...

How to defend against botnet attacks

Botnets have become one of the more insidious threats on the Internet in the last few years. Large-scale botnets such as the Storm, Asprox and Nugache networks have caused tremendous problems by serving as platforms for spamming operations, DDoS attacks and other mischief. In this podcast from...

Pirated Windows 7 builds botnet with Trojan

From eWEEK Brian Prince Attackers pushing pirated, malware-laced copies of Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 7 operating system have been actively trying to build a botnet. According to researchers at Damballa, attackers hid a Trojan inside of pirated copies of the operating system and began circulati...

A Zeus botnet self-destructs

From The H Security According to information which only recently came to light, in early April a botnet consisting of an estimated 100,000 PCs apparently destroyed itself – as its control server send out a command that made Windows inoperable. The botnet was based on the Zeus rsa.com botnet tool...

Mac OS X e-mail worm squirming

From ZDNet Dancho Danchev A newly discovered email worm dubbed OSX/Tored-A once again puts the spotlight on the potential worm-ability, and malware spreading tactics targeting Apple’s OS X. The worm propagates through emails harvested from infected hosts, and has a backdoor functionality allowing...

Botnet hijack: Researchers dissect Torpig malware operation

Security researchers at University of California, Santa Barbara have broken into the nerve center of the Torpig botnet also called Sinowal or Mebroot to find a ten-day stash of 10,000 bank accounts and credit card numbers worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. During the botnet hijack .pdf, the...

Health scares can provide lessons for security

The swine flu outbreak has inspired a flood of comparisons and false analogies to Conficker and other worms, most of which miss the many key differences between the Internet infrastructure and the human population. But there are lessons that security personnel can learn from the ways that health...

The Importance of Internet Identity and Anonymity

Last year, Craig Mundie issued a call to arms for a more “trustworthy Internet” — not that Microsoft has been entirely successful at implementing its arguably more humble Trustworthy Computing initiative. But let’s not let the computing industry’s failure to bring forward operating systems, web...

Researcher wants hacker groups hounded mercilessly

From ComputerWorld Gregg Keizer Criminal cybergangs must be harried, hounded and hunted computerworld.com until they’re driven out of business, a noted botnet researcher said today as he prepared to pitch a new anti-malware strategy later this week at the RSA Conference in San Francisco. “We need...

Mac OS X malware turns into DoS botnet

Multiple news outlets ZDNet, CBC, The Register and Washington Post are reporting on what appears to be the first malicious botnet made up only of machine’s running Apple’s Mac operating system. The botnet is directly linked to a previously known Trojan that was embedded into pirated copies of...

Conficker botnet not nearly as large as feared

An analysis of the Conficker peer-to-peer network set up by the latest variant of the worm shows that the size of the network is far smaller than originally thought. Estimates of the size of the botnet have run far into the millions, but analysts at Kaspersky Lab have been observing the network a...

Exploiting Skype: Building a telephone botnet

From the Industry Standard Robert McMillan Flaws in popular Internet-based telephony systems could be exploited to create a network of hacked phone accounts, somewhat like the botnets that have been wreaking havoc with PCs for the past few years. Researchers at Secure Science recently discovered...

Conficker business model: Scareware and spam

The Conficker botnet has started to use its peer-to-peer communication system to update itself and download scareware fake anti-virus programs to millions of infected Windows machines, according to malware hunters tracking the threat. The latest Conficker mutant comes a week after a heavily-hyped...

Inside the BBC's Chimera botnet

By Dancho Danchev, ZDNet Earlier this month, the controversial BBC purchase of a botnet and modifying the infected hosts in the name of “public interest” sparked a lot of debate on the pros and cons of their action. Condemned by certain security vendors, and naturally, at least from guerrilla PR...

Infrastructure attacks: A growing concern

In an essay published on his personal blog doxpara.com, security researcher Dan Kaminsky is starting to sound the alarm about “the extraordinary damage” we face from infrastructure attacks, warning that the industry needs to treat infrastructure with more security due diligence and care. “Forget...

NZ telco hires admitted botnet operator

By Michael Field, Sydney Morning Herald TelstraClear, Telstra’s New Zealand subsidiary, has hired one of the worlds best known hackers smh.com.au — a teenager known as “Akill”. Owen Thor Walker, a 19-year-old who became the subject of a US Federal Bureau of Investigation’s “Operation Bot Roast”...

Researchers spot router-based botnet worm

Researchers at DroneBL have spotted signs of a stealthy router-based botnet worm zdnet.com targeting routers and DSL modems. The worm, called “psyb0t,” has been circulating since at least January this year, infecting vulnerable embedded Linux devices such as the Netcomm NB5 ADSL modem and launchi...

BBC defends, explains botnet purchase

After taking some heat for its decision to buy a botnet and use it to send spam and launch a denial-of-service attack against a site owned by Prevx, the BBC has released an editor’s note to explain and defend the broadcast experiment. Here’s the gist of the Beeb’s defense, via BBC Click executive...

BBC paid 'a few thousand dollars' for botnet

In a statement on Monday, the BBC said that its decision to purchase and use a botnet to espose the malware epidemic had been “in the public interest”. “It was not our intention to break the law,” the BBC told ZDNet UK on Monday. “There is a powerful public interest in demonstrating the ease with...

BBC botnet buy: What were they thinking?

By Roel Schouwenberg As Dancho Danchev pointed out, the BBC leased itself a botnet zdnet.com. I couldn’t quite believe it when I read it. The BBC, arguably one of the very best TV producers in the world, surely should have known better? There are so many things wrong about this that I hardly know...