All Seized Domains Returned to No-IP

Less than a week after Microsoft seized nearly two dozen domains owned by a small hosting provider as part of a takedown of a malware operation, all of those domains are back in the control of the provider, No-IP. When Microsoft announced the takedown on June 30, officials said that the company h...

Dennis Fisher and Mike Mimoso Discuss This Week's Microsoft Takedown

Dennis Fisher and Mike Mimoso discuss the Microsoft malware takedown, its legal and security implications and the revelation of a massive financial fraud campaign in Brazil. Download: digitalunderground157.mp3 Music by Chris Gonsalves...

Microsoft Says 'Technical Error' Led to Legitimate No-IP Customers Losing Service

In the course of its actions to take down a major malware operation, Microsoft seized more than 20 domains from No-IP.com, a hosting provider in Nevada. Microsoft now admits that the company made a technical mistake as part of that takedown, an errors that resulted in legitimate No-IP.com custome...

Latest Microsoft Malware Takedown Causes Waves in Security Community

Microsoft’s latest takedown of a malware operation, announced Monday and involving the infrastructure of several malware families, has, like many of the company’s actions, elicited strong opinions on both sides of the issue from security researchers, activists and others with a stake in the game...

GameOver Zeus Takedown Shows Good Early Returns

The effect of the takedown of the GameOver Zeus botnet this week has been immediate and significant. Researchers who track the activity of the peer-to-peer botnet’s activity say that the volume of packets being sent out by infected machines has dropped to almost zero. On Friday, the FBI and...

Blackshades RAT Takedown Leads to 90 Arrests

More than 90 arrests have been made in connection with development and sales of a remote access Trojan used worldwide to steal data and spy on victims, including Syrian dissidents. The FBI and the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office yesterday announced the takedown of the Blackshades operation...

Facebook Hacker received $33,500 reward for Remote code execution vulnerability

Facebook has paid out its largest Bug Bounty ever of $33,500 to a Brazilian security researcher for discovering and reporting a critical Remote code execution vulnerability, which potentially allows the full control of a server. In September, 'Reginaldo Silva' found an XML External Entity Expansi...

Mariposa Botnet

Overview ICS-CERT has received reports and investigated infections of the MariposaDefence Intelligence, http://defintel.com/docs/MariposaAnalysis.pdf, website last accessed March 15, 2010. botnet, which have affected the business networks of multiple control system owners in recent months. ICS-CE...

Yahoo Removes Ads Redirecting to Magnitude Exploit Kit

The race to replace the Blackhole Exploit Kit as the web exploit pack of choice for cybercriminals seems to have an early leader in Magnitude. Researchers at Dutch security firm Fox-IT reported over the weekend that European visitors to Yahoo were falling victim to malicious ads hosted on the sit...

Microsoft Says ZeroAccess Click-Fraud Botnet Abandoned

Microsoft is declaring the ZeroAccess botnet dead. Two weeks after obtaining a court order to disrupt the botnet’s ability to carry out click-fraud, assistant general counsel Richard Boscovich of Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit said late last week that the botmasters behind ZeroAccess had abandon...

Cutwail Spam Botnet Feels Effect of Blackhole Takedown

The arrest of alleged hacker Paunch and the subsequent dismantling of the Blackhole Exploit Kit operation has cybercrime groups scrambling to find another automated means of delivering exploits. In the meantime, some are settling for old-school tactics that include infected email attachments and ...

Latest Snowden Leak Explains NSA Subversion of Tor Users

The latest Snowden documents, made public today, suggest the National Security Agency is able to peel back the veil on a small fraction of Tor users at a time, but overall the integrity of the anonymity network remains intact. Tor promises its users a level of anonymity online for their Web...

Kelihos P2P Botnet Leveraging Composite Blocking Lists

Kelihos, the peer-to-peer botnet with nine lives, keeps popping up with new capabilities that enable it to sustain itself and make money for its keepers by pushing spam, harvesting credentials and even stealing Bitcoins. According to a number of sources, Kelihos is now leveraging legitimate and...

Microsoft: 88 Percent of Citadel Botnets Down

Nearly two months after the company was part of an operation to disrupt a large number of Citadel botnets, Microsoft said that 88 percent of the botnets spawned by that malware have been taken down. Citadel is a Trojan designed specifically to steal financial information from a variety of sources...

Operation b54 Knocks 1,000+ Citadel Botnets Offline

UPDATE – Calling it the company’s “most aggressive” botnet operation operation to date, Microsoft has joined with the FBI for a massive disruption of the Citadel botnet. More than 1,400 individual botnets associated with the Citadel malware affecting more than five million people in total were...

Turkish PM Erdogan's staff emails hacked and leaked by Syrian Electronic Army Hackers as #OpTurkey

Syrian Electronic army appears to be taking part in ongoing operation against Turkey government website. Hackers collectively called Anonymous and SEA breached into Turkish Ministry of Interior website and the private information of staffers in PM Tayyip Erdogan's office. Hackers claimed that the...

Peer-to-Peer Botnet Takedowns a Challenge

The FBI, Justice Department and technology companies have had success shutting down botnets that rely on a centralized infrastructure and command and control servers to communicate with bots, steal data or send malicious commands. Peer-to-peer botnets, however, have proven more difficult to take...

Q&A: TJ Campana

REDMOND, Wash.–The Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit has been spearheading botnet takedowns and other anti-cybercrime operations for many years, and it has had remarkable success. But the cybercrime problem isn’t going away anytime soon, so the DCU is in the process of building a new cybercrime cente...

Latest Kelihos Botnet Shut Down Live at RSA Conference 2013

SAN FRANCISCO – Down goes Kelihos—again. The third version of the prolific peer-to-peer botnet responsible for volumes of pharmaceutical spam, Bitcoin wallet theft and credential harvesting was shut down before a live audience today at RSA Conference 2013. With the execution of a few commands tha...

Bamital botnet servers seized by Microsoft and Symantec

Microsoft teamed up with Symantec to take down a nasty malware affecting thousands upon thousands of PCs. Bamital botnet hijacked people’s search experiences and redirected victims to potentially dangerous sites that could leave them vulnerable to other online threats and steal their personal...