India to Host 3rd Annual 'The Hackers Conference' this Year in August

A crowd of Cyberspace experts along with the best minds in Indian hacking community, leaders in the information security community, policymakers and Government representatives will come together at a common platform to join their efforts in addressing the most critical issues of the Internet...

Researchers Dissect Spammers' Economic Ecosystem

A profitable spam campaign has three key elements—a reliable email list, filter-busting content, and a botnet for distribution—and each has been individually dissected and understood. But in order to adequately protect users from spam, which thrives in an established economic ecosystem, researche...

Versatility of Zeus Framework Encourages Criminal Innovation

A new report on the Zeus trojan’s evolution shows that the malware was moved from harvesting online banking credentials to controlling botnets and launching distributed denial of service attacks attributes the evolution to the highly customized and incredibly versatile framework Zeus is today...

DDoS Attacks a Cover for Financial Fraud, IP Theft

It’s difficult to imagine a noisier attack than a distributed denial-of-service attack. They’re an ever-present threat to banks and other businesses where the uptime of Web-based services is critical to customers and the well-being of an enterprise. And as a handful proved throughout 2013, they a...

Popular Remote access Trojan njRAT fuels Middle East Cyber Crime

Again the sophisticated piece of malware, "njRAT" has come to picture targeting the government agencies and organizations in the Middle East, according to the research carried out by Symantec security researchers. The researchers analyzed 721 samples of malicious code ‘njRAT’ and revealed that a...

U.S. Government Seeks Laxer Hacking Rules for Law Enforcement

The federal government is looking for a way to relax the laws to make it simpler for law enforcement agents to target and compromise the computers of suspects involved in criminal cases. The Department of Justice has forwarded a request to the body that considers such changes, asking that judges ...

Tor Network used to Host 900 Botnets and hidden Darknet Markets

Tor network offers users browse the Internet anonymously and is mostly used by activists, journalists to conceal their online activities from prying eyes. But it also has the Dark side, as Tor is also a Deep Web friendly tool that allows hackers and cyber criminals to carry out illicit activities...

Tilon/SpyEye2 Banking Trojan Usage Declining after SpyEye Author Arrest

Today, when we come across various malware, exploit kits and botnets that are in the wild, we think about an effective Antivirus solution or a Security Patch, but the most effective solution is always "The arrest of malware authors and culprits who are involved in the development of Malware." Til...

List of 8,000 FTP Credentials for Sale in Underground Forums

Hackers are targeting FTP upload sites with the hopes of redirecting victims to spam or even infecting webservers that rely on FTP applications for updates. Hold Security reported yesterday it had secured a list of credentials for close to 7,800 FTP sites being circulated in cybercrime forums. Th...

Cutwail Spam Botnet Feels Effect of Blackhole Takedown

The arrest of alleged hacker Paunch and the subsequent dismantling of the Blackhole Exploit Kit operation has cybercrime groups scrambling to find another automated means of delivering exploits. In the meantime, some are settling for old-school tactics that include infected email attachments and ...

DGA Changer Malware Able to Modify Domain-Generation Seed on the Fly

Malware authors have been using domain-generation algorithms for a few years now, often in botnet-related malware that needs to stay one step ahead of takedown attempts and law enforcement agencies. Now, researchers have discovered that a strain of malware that may have been part of the attack in...

ZeroAccess Peer To Peer Botnet Takedown Incomplete

Microsoft trumpeted its disruption of the ZeroAccess peer-to-peer botnet late last week, but some experts are holding off on scheduling a celebratory ticker-tape parade. With numerous successful takedowns of botnets with a centralized command and control infrastructure in its back pocket, Microso...

Atrax Kit Boasts Tor Connectivity, Bitcoin Extraction

Yet another commercial crimekit has been spotted making the rounds on the underground malware forums that uses the anonymity network Tor to stealthily communicate with its command and control servers. While it isn’t the first of its kind to use Tor, the kit, nicknamed Atrax, is cheap and comes wi...

DDoS attack from Browser-based Botnets that lasted for 150 hours

Browser-based botnets are the T-1000s of the DDoS world. Just like the iconic villain of the old Judgment Day movie, they too are designed for adaptive infiltration. This is what makes them so dangerous. Where other more primitive bots would try to brute-force your defenses, these bots can simply...

DDoS attack from Browser-based Botnets that lasted for 150 hours

Browser-based botnets are the T-1000s of the DDoS world. Just like the iconic villain of the old Judgment Day movie, they too are designed for adaptive infiltration. This is what makes them so dangerous. Where other more primitive bots would try to brute-force your defenses, these bots can simply...

Shylock/Caphaw Banking Malware Infections on the Rise

Two dozen major U.S. and European banks are in the crosshairs of the Shylock, or Caphaw, financial malware of late, and victims who trade with one of the 24 financial institutions are at risk of giving up their credentials and losing assets in their accounts. Malware researchers have noticed a ri...

Call for Ban on Vulnerable PHP SuperGlobal Variables

The ease with which PHP applications can be subverted should be pretty apparent by now given the number of botnets supported by compromised sites hosting PHP code. The biggest culprit in the PHP universe may be a set of nine variables called SuperGlobals that provide programmers with development...

Microsoft: 88 Percent of Citadel Botnets Down

Nearly two months after the company was part of an operation to disrupt a large number of Citadel botnets, Microsoft said that 88 percent of the botnets spawned by that malware have been taken down. Citadel is a Trojan designed specifically to steal financial information from a variety of sources...

65 Sites Compromised in ZeroAccess Trojan Attacks

As many as 65 websites have been compromised in an attack that has snared another Washington, D.C.-area media website as well as a number of travel and leisure sites. While the sites aren’t topically related, they’re all hosting advertisements injected with malicious code hosted on...

Peer-to-Peer Botnets Grow Fivefold

The resiliency of peer-to-peer botnets is too good to pass up for fraudsters and spam mavens tired of watching expensive and centralized command and control infrastructures be taken down by authorities and technology companies. Botnets such as ZeroAccess, TDL4/TDSS and Zeus v3 have shown the way...