German Police Disrupt DDoS-for-Hire Platform dstat[.]cc; Suspects Arrested

German law enforcement authorities have announced the disruption of a criminal service called dstat.cc that made it possible for other threat actors to easily mount distributed denial-of-service DDoS attacks. "The platform made such DDoS attacks accessible to a wide range of users, even those...

A state of constant uncertainty or uncertain constancy? Fast flux explained

Last August, WireX made headlines. For one thing, it was dubbed the first-known DDoS botnet that used the Android platform. For another, it used a technique that—for those who have been around in the industry for quite a while now—rung familiar in the ears: fast flux. In the context of...

Researchers Pull the Plug on Remaining Grum Botnet C&C Servers

Just a couple of days after authorities in the Netherlands pulled the plug on two of the four command-and-control servers behind the Grum spam botnet, the remaining C&C servers have been taken offline as well, thanks to a cooperative effort among researchers. As a result, the number of...

Attackers Moving to Social Networks For Command and Control

Bot herders and the crimeware gangs behind banker Trojans have had a lot of success in the last few years with using bulletproof hosting providers as their main base of operations. But more and more, they’re finding that social networks such as Twitter and Facebook are offering even more fertile...

Honeypots Threatened By Zombies

Innovations in botnet technology threaten the usefulness of honeypots, one of the main ways to study how bot herders control networks of zombie PCs. Computer scientists led by Cliff Zou and colleagues at the University of Central Florida warn that bot herders can now avoid honeypots – unprotected...