Ah Twitter in the news again, the bad guys sure do keep up with new trends. After being taken offline for a while by a Joejob DDoS attack Twitter is in the news again – this time it’s being used as the command channel for a Botnet.
The normal method for controlling Botnets is via an [...]

We did mention Torpig in passing back in January 2008 when talking about the Mebroot rootkit which digs down deep into the Master Boot Record.
It seems like Torpig has been pretty active since then and the latest break is that some security researchers have managed to infiltrate the botnet and collect some data on what [...]

A bit of an update to the conficker worm that is supposedly scheduled for new updates and instructions today wednesday 1st. April 2009 and that nobody except for the bad guys knows what those instructions would be. Fyodor has rolled out a new nmap beta release to the nmap scripting engine that enables it [...]

So the big Conficker scare of April 1st has passed without any real events, no major sites taken down, no major online terror campaigns spawned.
Just a new more sophisticated, harder to stop version of Conficker updating from a longer list of domains.
It seems like this malware might be here to stay and infecting more and [...]

The BBC has made an odd move recently by buying/seeding a botnet of 22,000 computers under the guise of investigative journalism.
They claim it’s not illegal as they caused no harm and only sent spam to e-mail accounts used by themselves. Technically I think it’s still breaking the law under the Computer Misuse Act but most [...]

It seems to the feds are really cracking down on cybercrime recently, with a special kind of attention paid to botnets and their handlers. The sentences are getting stiffer too, this time with 4 years in prison for running a botnet and data theft.
I hope they keep it up, botnets are the scourge of the [...]

Back in November there was a considerable drop in Spam when Spam friendly ISP McColo was cut off from the Internet by it’s upstream peer.
Srizbi worm was pretty smart though and was picking up again by the end of November. Later in the year the botnets were somewhat neutralised leading to a huge drop in [...]

After McColo was partially disconnected from the Internet by it’s peers global spam dropped noticeably.
It seems however that the spam was emanating from a zombie network and the control servers were hosted by McColo, the creators of the botnet (Srizbi) were smart about it though and built a fail-safe system into the the malware.
It should [...]

We all know what botnets are (think so), but anyway let’s see a proper definition of botnets taken from shadowserver… and I quote:

A botnet is a collection of computers, connected to the internet, that interact to accomplish some distributed task. Although such a collection of computers can be used for useful and constructive applications, the [...]

Another one bites the dust with another reasonably hefty sentence, this time a botherder or botnet master.
Just under 4 years and a big chunk of change as a fine, I guess he probably has plenty of cash stashed somewhere though. These guys can really rake it in with their mass infectors of doom.

A US-based hacker [...]