Adele Bests Adderall As Affiliate Spammers Offer Music Downloads

Cyber criminals long ago discovered that there’s a big market for pharmaceuticals online, prompting a tsunami of pharmaceutical spam offering everything from “herbal Viagra” to Prozac and Adderall. But new data from security firm Webroot suggests that scammers are experimenting with new products,...

Blackhole Exploit Kit's Dominance On Infected Hosts Could Push Rivals To the Cloud

The Blackhole exploit kit has a near monopoly on infected Web pages, according to Web security firm M86’s latest Security Labs Report, issued today. PDF The bi-annual report, which covers the last half of 2011, July to December, describe Blackhole as the source of a whopping 95 percent of all the...

Microsoft Says Rustock Botnet Cut in Half

In March, Microsoft announced that its Digital Crimes Unit had scored a major victory in the war against hackers with the takedown of the Rustock botnet. Since then, the company has continued to monitor the activity of the network and the machines infected with the Rustock-related malware and fou...

Security Threats Increasing in Sophistication and Precision

IBM’s X-Force 2010 Trend and Risk report showed that as vulnerability disclosures hit their highest level ever in 2010, security threats continued to increase in sophistication and precision. Like the term or not, 2010 may well have been the year of the APT, the term has become familiar to nearly...

Rustock Botnet: Dead Or Just Reloading?

Reports indicate that the massive drop in spam levels are linked to the sudden disappearance of the Rustock botnet. However, recent history suggests the interruption may only be temporary. Spamhaus’s Composite Spam Blocklist CBL claims that dozens of Rustock’s internet servers, which for years ha...

Microsoft botnet take down will not stop spam !

A prominent security researcher said he doubts Microsoft's take down of the Waledac botnet would have any impact on spam levels, as the company claimed. "Waledac just is not a hugely prolific spammer," said Joe Stewart, director of malware analysis at SecureWorks and a noted botnet researcher. "S...