Tag: BOTNET

Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit, working with federal law enforcement agents, has brought down the world's largest spam network, Rustock. Rustock, at its peak, was a botnet of around 2 million spam-sending zombies capable of sending out 30 billion spam email per day. Microsoft's wholesale slaughter of Rustock could reduce worldwide spam output by up to 39%. Rustock was taken down, piece ...

Over at the Lookout Mobile Security blog there's news of a sophisticated new trojan spreading on Android devices. Dubbed Geinimi, the Trojan has been injected into legitimate versions of Android games (primarily) and apps, and distributed via third-party app stores in China. While Lookout isn't certain of Geinimi's intent, the company believes it to be capable of receiving commands from a ...

The battle against malware sure has changed over the past couple of years. It's no longer you and I in our chairs at home armed only with knowledge and an antivirus app. No, today's fight against trojans, botnets, and other software evil-doers involves everyone from lawyers to the police. In the case of the recent Bredolab botnet, it was the Dutch police who stepped up. Following a concerted ...

The European Union has unveiled the European Grid Infrastructure project, which will allow researchers to tap into the collective power of more than 200,000 desktop computers across 30 EU nations. That's a whole lotta computing power. As is the case with similar distributed computing projects like SETI@home, the thought behind EGI is that those 200,000 computer systems are sitting idle more ...

It was only a matter of time. First, jailbroken iPhones were humorously Rickrolled by a worm, and now both iPhones and Android phones have been exploited to form a botnet that is over 9,000 devices strong! Fortunately, like the Rickroll, the botnet was a benign experiment by two researchers at TippingPoint Digital Vaccine Labs; a proof of concept, just to see how easy it would be. No one was ...

In a case of a good-defence-is-a-good-offence, a team of nerds led by a researcher from security company FireEye has just brought down the Mega-D botnet. This particular botnet accounted for some 12 percent of all spam email and was controlled by servers in Israel, Turkey, and the U.S. A botnet, if you're not down with script-kiddie hax0r lingo, is a 'bot network'. A bot is a robot -- though ...

If you didn't ask to have your Facebook password reset, think twice before opening an email that looks like it's from Facebook's support team. A lot of these fake password-reset emails have been going out lately, and the attachments they contain can take over your computer and add it to the Bredolab botnet, according to ZDnet. Your first clue that these emails are sketchy is that they contain a ...

The FBI is announcing a crackdown on "botherders," or the unscrupulous folks who send out viruses and trojans to hijack your computer and use it for their own nefarious purposes. Sorry, had to make it sound like something out of an old Western there to fit wit the term "botherder." Anyway, the FBI says it's identified over a million potentially infected IP addresses as part of an ongoing ...

Creepy. The number of compromised computers controlled as a part of large botnets has tripled in recent weeks. According to Shadowserver Foundation, a group dedicated to monitoring the dark slimy underbelly of our beloved Internet. Botnets are often used to send spam, but are also used for denial of service attacks, phishing sites, and essentially every dark and seedy Internet task you can ...

Christopher Maxwell, of California was sent to prison for 37 months (3 years) for using viruses to plant adware on people's computers, netting over $100,000. His ring of hackers broke into 629,000 PCs (most running Windows) including several at government installations. Chris is the latest criminal and hacker (no they aren't the same thing) to be jailed for computer crimes in recent months. Botnet ...