Report: FCC May Push ISPs To Crack Down on Botnets

We’ve known for a long time that botnets are the Madwoman in the Attic at most major Internet service providers ISPs- an unseemly and occasionally embarrassing presence that is occasionally dealt with, but usually silently tolerated. But now, it seems, there’s pressure mounting on ISPs to do...

SOL11719 - Mitigating risk from SSH brute force login attacks

Vulnerability Description F5 products and versions that are affected by this Security Advisory F5 Product Development has determined that all products and versions are affected by the issue described in this security advisory. Note: For information about signing up to receive security notice...

Botnets Using Ubiquity as Security

LIMASSOL, CYPRUS–The operators of large-scale botnets such as Gumblar and others for years have relied upon stealth, creativity and guile to hide their creations from researchers and authorities for as long as possible. This has been especially vital for botnets with centralized command-and-contr...

CAPTCHAs Get the Botnet Beatdown

Botnets increasingly are creating phony online accounts on legitimate websites and online communities in order to steal information from enterprises. Merrick Furst, botnet expert and distinguished professor of computer science at Georgia Tech, says bots are showing up “en masse” to customer-facin...

Have We Lost the Desktop Security Battle?

For years, security experts, analysts and even users have been lamenting the state of desktop security. Viruses, spam, Trojans and rootkits have added up to create an ugly picture. But, the good news is that the desktop security battle may be over. The less-than-good news, however, is that we may...

How Many Botnets Exist? Depends on the Data

How many botnets are there? Symantec says 6.8 million, but a former Symantec executive at Immunet and a key creator of the Internet Security Threat Report says his former company is off by several magnitudes of order. Gunter Ollmann of Damballa concurs with Immunet and puts the numbers between 19...

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...