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...

The Malware Cash Factory

Over on our sister site Viruslist.com, researchers Sergey Golovanov and Igor Soumenkov have published an article that studies a single spam e-mail and illustrates the methods used by cyber criminals to create botnets and conduct mass spam mailings. The methods and techniques used are clearly...

Malware Economy is Thriving

TORONTO — The legitimate economy may be in rough shape right now, but the same cannot be said for the underground economy. Malware authors and botmasters are thriving, experts say, with some online criminals charging as much as $3,500 for their attack toolkits. But don’t be intimidated by the hig...

Beware the Tiny, Unknown Botnet

DarkReading’s Kelly Jackson Higgins is reporting on a new study that shows bot infections in the rise in the enterprise, most coming from tiny, unknown botnets built for targeting victim organizations. The three-month study of more than 600 different botnets found having infiltrated enterprise...

Google Exec Calls For ISPs to Get Tough on Botnets

GENEVA — Head of Google’s anti-malvertising team Eric Davis wants Internet Service Providers ISPs to look beyond profits and take a more proactive approach to dealing with malware-infested computers on their networks. During a keynote presentation at the Virus Bulletin conference here, Davis said...

Google: Cooperation Needed to Combat Malicious Ads

GENEVA — A more comprehensive and serious level of cooperation among industry leaders is needed to help stop the scourge of malicious Web ads and botnets that result from the infected PCs, a top Google executive said Wednesday. Eric Davis, the head of anti-malvertising at Google, speaking to a...

The Economics of Botnets

From Viruslist.com Yury Namestnikov In the past ten years, botnets have evolved from small networks of a dozen PCs controlled from a single C&C command and control center into sophisticated distributed systems comprising millions of computers with decentralized control. Why are these enormous...

What Was the Effect of Shutting Down McColo?

From Light Blue Touchpaper Richard Clayton On 11 November 2008 McColo, a Californian server hosting company, was disconnected from the Internet. This took the controllers for 6 major botnets offline. It has been widely reported that email spam volumes were markedly reduced for some time thereafte...

DDoS Attacks Ongoing Against FTC, Other Sites

It looks like the distributed denial-of-service attack, once the favorite tactic of script kiddies and professional hackers alike, is coming back into favor. Attackers have been conducting an ongoing DDoS attack against the Federal Trade Commission’s main site, as well as some other government...

[SECURITY] Fedora 10 Update: eggdrop-1.6.19-4.fc10

Eggdrop is the world's most popular Open Source IRC bot, designed for flexibility and ease of use. It is extendable with Tcl scripts and/or C modules, has support for the big five IRC networks and is able to form botnets, share partylines and userfiles between bots...

[SECURITY] Fedora 9 Update: eggdrop-1.6.19-4.fc9

Eggdrop is the world's most popular Open Source IRC bot, designed for flexibility and ease of use. It is extendable with Tcl scripts and/or C modules, has support for the big five IRC networks and is able to form botnets, share partylines and userfiles between bots...

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...

Radical steps are needed to fix Internet security

The Internet as we know it today was designed to be a place where people could go about their business, whatever it happened to be, anonymously and without interference from other users. This model worked reasonably well for a long time, but it’s become painfully clear in recent months that some...

Attack of the mini-botnets

From DarkReading.com Kelly Jackson Higgins Big-name botnets like Kraken/Bobax, Srizbi, Rustock, the former Storm — and even the possible botnet-in-waiting, Conficker — have gained plenty of notoriety, but it’s the smaller and less conspicuous ones you can’t see that are doing the most damage...

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...