Gunter Ollmann on Opt-In Botnets and Targeted Attacks

Dennis Fisher talks with Gunter Ollmann, VP of research at Damballa, about the new generation of hacktivism and opt-in botnets, as well as the trend toward targeted attacks in corporate environments. Podcast audio courtesy of sykboy65 Subscribe to the Digital Underground podcast on...

Which ISPs Are Hosting the Bad Guys?

Security blogger Brian Krebs has compiled lists of the top 10 ISPs who are hosting the worst botnets, spam, phishing, and other malware from independent tracking organizations. These lists come from: Stop Badware, F.I.R.E., Phishtank, Zeustracker, Malware Domain List, Arbor Top ASN List, Emerging...

Tata CSO Says Tier1 ISPs Can Remove Botnets, Malware

Internet service providers have the ability to wipe nearly all malicious activity in their network without stepping on individual privacy and civil liberties, said Adam Rice, chief security officer at Mumbai-based Tata Communications. Read the full article. TechTarget...

The Future of Botnets

A lot of people in the security industry are paid to think like attackers: pen testers, security consultants, software security experts. But some of these people have never met an actual black hat, so much of their work is necessarily based on what they think attackers might do in a given...

Botnets Find New Internet Homes Quickly

The takedown of 100 servers used to control Zeus-related botnets may be a short-lived victory, security researchers said after discovering that about a third of the orphaned channels were able to regain connectivity in less than 48 hours. The resurrection of at least 30 command and control channe...

ISP Known for Distributing Malware Goes Dark

A network frequently used for malware delivery was shut down Wednesday night, probably against the will of its operators. Troyak.org, an Internet service provider well-known for serving Zeus botnets and other malware delivery methods, went dark overnight, resulting in the shutdown of as many as 2...

Is That a Bot In Your Pocket? Or Does It Just Look Like One?

Last week at the RSA Conference, my colleague Derek Brown and I, presented findings from a research project titled MOBOTS: Pocketful of Pwnage, which was designed to show how easy it would be to create a large mobile botnet. Please note that we did not actually create a botnet; we simply presente...

How Japanese ISPs Deal with Botnets

Japan’s “Cyber Clean Center” is a little-known effort by the Japanese Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center JP-CERT and a collection of 76 Japanese ISPs covering 90 percent of the nation’s Internet users to fight botnets and other security issues. Read the full article...

Malicious Spam Jumps to 3 Billion Messages Per Day

Last year was an interesting year in the security industry in a number of ways, but perhaps none more so than the monstrous increase in the volume of malicious spam. In the second half of 2009, the number of spam messages sent per day skyrocketed from 600 million to three billion, according to ne...

Botnets: Advanced Spy Tools for Hackers

Botnets give the common hacker espionage tools formerly reserved for nation states. Brian Krebs interviews Roland Dobbins on the “democratization of espionage.” Read the full article. CSOonline...

Botnets Hit Perl Testers With Denial of Service Attack

According to a posting on the CPAN Testers’ blog, the CPAN Testers’ server has been being aggressively scanned by “20-30 bots every few seconds” in what they call “a dedicated denial of service attack”; these bots “completely ignore the rules specified in robots.txt”. Read the full article. The H...

Attackers Buying Own Data Centers for Botnets, Spam

The malware writers and criminals who run botnets for years have been using shared hosting platforms and so-called bulletproof hosting providers as bases of operations for their online crimes. But, as law enforcement agencies and security experts have moved to take these providers offline, the...

Botnets Targeting Full Spectrum of Servers

Web servers, FTP servers, and even SSL servers are becoming prime targets for botnet operators, not as command and control servers or as pure zombies, but more as a place to host their malicious code and files, or in some cases to execute high-powered spam runs. Read the full article. Dark Readin...

Top Botnets By Name, Size And Scope

Botnets – apart from inundating out inboxes with spam – can also be used for ulterior purposes such as executing DDoS attacks or hosting websites, so understanding the “modus operandi” and size behind the well-known names is a good idea; Here’s a top ten botnet list. Read the full article. Help N...

Botnets Evolve, Adapt, Expand Spam Volume

Compromised zombie machines accounted for more than four in five 83.4 per cent of an estimated global volume of 107 billion junk mail messages sent out every day during 2009. Read the full article. The Register...

Gumblar: New Generation of Self-Building Botnets

We’ve been looking at the infrastructure of the Gumblar malware and found some curious facts on how Gumblar operates which we would like to share to make hosting owners aware of the Gumblar threat. Analysis of some infected websites showed that the only way to inject the infection of Gumblar was ...

How to Take Down a Botnet

The botnet problem has reached epidemic levels in recent months, with the continued growth of large-scale botnets, as well as the identification of smaller, more targeted networks around the world. But researchers have been taking steps to disrupt botnets of late, with some notable successes, as...

Honeypot Emulates Searched Attacks

A new open-source honeypot project called Glastopf “dynamically emulates vulnerabilities attackers are looking for” and can auto-detect and allow unknown attacks. The project, designed by Lukas Rist, came out of the Google Summer of Code program. ISPs, web hosting companies and researchers can us...

Dave Dittrich on Botnets, Conficker and the Evolution of Malware

Dennis Fisher talks with Dave Dittrich of the University of Washington, one of the top botnet and malware researchers in the industry, about the evolution of botnets and malware, the innovations of the Nugache botnet and the monetization of large-scale botnets. Download Subscribe to the Digital...

How to Steal a Botnet

Botnets have become a major problem in the last few years, with massive networks such as Storm, Nugache and others comprising hundreds of thousands of infected machines. This video lays out the foundation of the problem and explains the efforts of researchers to take over the Torpig botnet...