botnet

Where the botnets are

Last week, the FBI announced the end of the second phase of Operation Bot Roast, an ongoing investigation into botnets, and the criminal activity associated with them. I recently asked Dr. Jose Nazario of Arbor Networks where in the world the bot herders, the people who control the botnets, might be. Here are some excerpts:

We see a few major groups. We see Americans and Western Europeans often interested in using the botnet to make money either directly or indirectly by selling services, or stealing information from those botnets to sell and use credit card information bank information, etc.

There … Read more

Episode 614: CyberCommand is go

FBI's Operation Bot Roast II nets additional indictments, sentences

Today the FBI announced the completion of Bot Roast II, the second phase of an ongoing investigation into the creation and use of botnets for illegal online activity. Botnets are networks created by remotely controlling several hundred or several thousand compromised computers worldwide. In 2007, botnets have been used by criminals in various ways to make money online. The ongoing investigation, in at least one specific case, is being assisted by the U.S. Secret Service.

Among the results announced today are three new indictments, the guilty pleas from two others, and the sentencing of three others. To date, the … Read more

Storm worm rivals world's best supercomputers

What good are several million Storm worm infected PCs? According to one researcher, the current computing power of Storm worm's botnet is greater than IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer. "If you calculate pure theoretical throughput," Matt Sergeant, chief antispam technologist with security vendor MessageLabs, "then I'm sure the botnet has more capacity than IBM's Blue Gene. If you sat them down to play chess, the botnet would win."

The Australian publication IT News also quotes Sergeant as saying, "In terms of power, the botnet utterly blows the supercomputers away." He goes … Read more

Elephants and bank robbing, not a good mix

Remember the Storm Worm, which rapidly swept onto users' computers in January via a bogus e-mail about a real-life, fast-moving European storm front?

Well, security firm SecureWorks released information Thursday noting the size of the botnet has swelled to 1.7 million bots in the months of June and July, up from 2,815 in the first five months of the year.

SecureWorks also notes that while the botnet has primarily been used for spamming, the hacker or hackers in charge of the ever-growing botnet may use its amassed army for more devious activities.

"We don't know the … Read more

FBI's Operation Bot Roast announces three arrests

The FBI today released a press release summarizing the bureau's efforts so far to shut down botnets. In the release, the FBI acknowledges the work of the CERT Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University, Microsoft, and the Botnet Task Force, for either contacting victims or reporting criminal activity. Through an ongoing investigation known as Operation Bot Roast, the bureau has uncovered many botnets, collections of compromised desktop PCs worldwide, that have been used for various criminal activities.

In the release, the bureau cites the recent arrests of James C. Brewer of Arlington, Texas, who is alleged to have operated … Read more

Cyber war in Estonia

Warning: disturbing a war memorial can provoke all out cyber war--at least in Estonia. On April 27, 2007, Estonia officials relocated the "Bronze Soldier," a Soviet-era war memorial commemorating an unknown Russian who died fighting the Nazis, a move that incited rioting by ethnic Russians and the blockading of the Estonian Embassy in Moscow. It also started a large and sustained distributed denial-of-service attack on several Estonian Web sites, including those of government ministries and the prime minister's Reform Party. A denial-of-service attack (DoS) occurs when someone directs a large number of requests to a target URL; … Read more

New gang war raging on the Internet

It's like something out of The Sopranos. Antivirus researchers at Moscow-based Kaspersky Labs have identified criminal gangs engaged in a turf battle online. The primary groups are responsible for the Warezov and Zhelatin worms; these worms then download Trojans that are in turn responsible for a majority of the spam and malware circulating on the Web. Basically, new spam and new phishing attacks are designed to switch your remotely controlled PC from belonging to the Warezov gang or the Zhelatin gang. The resulting botnets--collections of remotely controlled PCs--have proved profitable, luring unsuspecting Internet users to purchase porn or other … Read more