botnet

Microsoft has put a halt to the Kelihos botnet and is accusing a Czech resident of hosting the botnet and using it to deliver spam and steal data, the company said today.

Kelihos, also known as "Waledac 2.0" after a previous botnet that Microsoft shut down last year, comprised about 41,000 infected computers worldwide and was capable of sending 3.8 billion spam e-mails per day, according to Microsoft.

The complaint filed last week in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia accuses Dominique Alexander Piatti, Dotfree Group SRO and John Does 1-22 of infecting victim computers with malware to create the Kelihos botnet, using it to send unregulated pharmaceutical and other spam, harvest e-mails and passwords, conduct fraudulent stock scams and, in some cases, promote sites dealing with sexual exploitation of children.

Meanwhile, subdomains were allegedly used to infect Mac computers with MacDefender scareware, according to the complaint. Piatti could not immediately be reached for comment.… Read more

exclusive Microsoft is hoping that federal agents will bring to justice one of the world's most notorious spammers, known to the company only as Cosma2k.

According to Microsoft, Cosma2k is the handle of the alleged ringleader of the Rustock botnet, which earlier this year was the purveyor of more e-mail spam than any other network in the world, sending as many as 30 billion messages a day at its peak.

In March, Microsoft worked with federal law enforcement agents to shut down the Rustock botnet. Earlier this month, the company won a summary judgment against the unnamed defendants that … Read more

With a name like SkyNET, it's got to be scary. This flying robo-hacker deserves its "Terminator"-inspired moniker: Although it stops short of actually hunting humans, it's a potential nightmare for anyone with a wireless home network. Worse, it's a DIYer's dream: cheap and easy to build and fun to operate.

SkyNET combines a toy helicopter and a computer configured to attack Wi-Fi networks. The result is a drone the CIA would be proud of. The nasty little device can compromise computers on wireless networks and dragoon them into botnets. Botnets are widely used for hacking, denial-of-service attacks, and spamming.

The devious beauty of SkyNET is that by controlling the botnet from a drone rather than an Internet connection, the botmaster is harder to track down. To catch the bad guy you'd have to figure out that a drone is involved, spot the drone, and follow it back to its owner (assuming the black hat goes to pick it up). Either that or catch it and do a full-blown forensic investigation to figure out who made it.… Read more

The FBI is investigating denial-of-service attacks targeting several U.S. battery retail Web sites last year that were traced to computers at Russian domains in what looks like a corporate-sabotage campaign, according to documents published yesterday by The Smoking Gun.

The October 2010 distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on Batteriesplus.com and Batteries4less.com also targeted other battery-related Web sites and have been used to attack a "wide range" of United States-based businesses, causing combined estimated financial losses of more than $600,000, according an FBI analysis of attack logs provided to the agency by an unnamed network security … Read more

Myspace has been sold to Specific Media for a whopping $35 million & Justin Timberlake is reported to be one of the investors. Can Justin bring the sexy back to Myspace? Google's Google Plus social media site opens & closes the invites within 1 day & Antuan Goodwin might be to blame. And Donald Bell joins us to give his two cents on the HP TouchPad. It's show 1501... Join us tomorrow as we go back in time for show 1500!

Security researchers at Kaspersky Lab have detailed a new botnet--a collection of infected computers controlled by cybercriminals--called TDL-4, that might just be "indestructible."

TDL-4 gets its name by being the fourth generation of the botnet. In 2008, the original TDL appeared. It has been altered over the last several years. With TDL-4, Kaspersky has found, the malware creators have drastically improved the botnet over its predecessors.

"The malware writers extended the program functionality, changed the algorithm used to encrypt the communication protocol between bots and the botnet command and control servers, and attempted to ensure they had … Read more

Though Rustock remains down for the count, according to Microsoft, the hunt goes on for the creators of the infamous botnet.

Rustock was taken down this past March by Microsoft and law enforcement officials who used a combination of legal maneuvers and raids to seize control of the servers that ran the notorious spamming network. Since then, Rustock has remained "dead and decaying," said Richard Boscovich, senior attorney for Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit, in a blog published yesterday.

But taking down the network itself is only half the battle in keeping botnets like Rustock offline. Tracking down the … Read more

By seizing servers and domain names and getting permission to remotely turn off malware on compromised PCs, U.S. officials have disabled a botnet that steals data from infected computers.

The legal actions are part of the "most complete and comprehensive enforcement action ever taken by U.S. authorities to disable an international botnet," according to a statement from the Department of Justice. A botnet is a group of computers that have been compromised and are being remotely controlled by attackers, typically to send spam or attack other computers.

It's the first time law enforcement in the … Read more

The successful takedown of the Rustock botnet cut the volume of spam across the world by one-third, according to Symantec's March 2011 MessageLabs Intelligence Report.

By the end of last year, the notorious botnet was responsible for sending out 44 billion spam messages per day, or more than 47 percent of the world's total output, making it the leading purveyor of spam. Though Rustock lost some steam this year, it still managed to send out more than 13 billion daily spam e-mails earlier this month prior to its takedown, said Symantec.

But legal actions by Microsoft and raids … Read more