botnets

Comcast is announcing today that it will be offering all of its Internet customers a free service that alerts them if it appears that their computer is infected with botnet malware.

The cable giant, which is the largest residential ISP in the U.S., began a trial of the botnet detection service a year ago in Denver. Now, Comcast will be rolling it out to the rest of its more than 16 million Xfinity Internet customers over the next few months.

Customers will receive e-mails with information about how the Botnet Identification and Notification service works, as well as info … Read more

Spam accounted for 95 percent of all e-mail sent worldwide during the third quarter, according to a report released today.

Panda Security's third-quarter report (PDF) also found that 50 percent of all spam came from 10 countries, with India, Brazil, and Russia as the top three sources. The U.S. came in No. 8, while the U.K. dropped off the list. Much of the spam that invades in-boxes comes from botnets that hijack computers whose owners don't realize their PCs have been infected, the report noted.

Trojans now are responsible for 55 percent of all malware threats, … Read more

A man reportedly targeted by an online sex sting was convicted yesterday on a charge relating to launching denial-of-service attacks on sites that posted stories about the incident.

Bruce Raisley, 49, of Kansas City, Mo., was convicted of launching a program that infected about 100,000 computers around the world and directing them to attack the Web sites of Rolling Stone Magazine and others, the Department of Justice said in a statement.

Specifically, he was accused of writing a virus that turned infected PCs into a botnet that then attacked the Web sites. He faces up to 10 years in … Read more

With court backing and a novel use of a civil procedure, Microsoft appears to be close to obliterating the Waledac spam botnet, changing the way online criminal operations are defeated.

A magistrate judge in federal court in Virginia is expected to recommend within days that the judge hearing Microsoft's case grant a default judgment, Richard Boscovich, a senior Microsoft attorney told CNET on Wednesday.

This would mean that the 276 Web domains deployed as Waledac command-and-control servers to provide instructions to thousands of infected computers would be forfeited to Microsoft, effectively shutting down the botnet for good, he said. … Read more

Botnets are now responsible for sending 95 percent of all spam, up from 84 percent in April, and almost half of that spam comes from a single botnet, Rustock.

Rustock sent 41 percent of the world's botnet spam in August, up from 32 percent in April. This is despite the network actually shrinking in size from 2.5 million to 1.3 million bots over the same period, security company Symantec said on Tuesday. This means Rustock is currently responsible for 39 percent of all the world's spam e-mails.

"Overall, the total amount of spam in circulation … Read more

A criminal gang has stolen over 60GB of data using a botnet that has infected around 55,000 computers around the world, according to a report from security company AVG.

The botnet, which AVG has dubbed "Mumba," has compromised systems in the U.K., as well as in the U.S., Germany, and Spain, the company said in a report (PDF) released Monday. The stolen credentials found by AVG's researchers includes bank account numbers, credit card details, and social-networking log-ins.

"The Mumba botnet--so called because of some funky attributes our researchers found on the server--was created … Read more

LAS VEGAS--A Russian group is doing check counterfeiting in the U.S. using malware, botnets, virtual private networks, and money mules recruited online, according to research expected to be revealed at the Black Hat hacker conference here on Wednesday.

The SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit investigated the bizarre operation over three months and is now working with law enforcement to find out who is responsible for the scam, which is believed to have netted as much as $9 million from fake checks in the last year.

SecureWorks researchers uncovered the complicated operation in April when it discovered a unique variant of … Read more

Botnets are available for hire for as little as $8.94 an hour, underscoring how little financial muscle or technical expertise is needed to carry out attacks, according to VeriSign's cybersecurity intelligence arm.

VeriSign said Monday that it carried out an online investigation into 25 botnet operators in February, targeting botnet services advertised on three Web forums. The study found that hourly botnet rental pricing started at $8.94, while the average price for a 24-hour rental was $67.20.

The services advertised a number of attack vectors, including ICMP, SYN, UDP, HTTP, HTTPS, and Data. The botnet operators … Read more

Researchers have uncovered a botnet that uses compromised Web servers instead of the usual personal computers to launch denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.

Security firm Imperva said on Wednesday it uncovered a botnet of about 300 Web servers after the company witnessed traffic coming from a compromised server and then searched for the attack code via Google. Web servers were commonly used in such attacks a decade ago but had been replaced by the more ubiquitous Windows-based PCs, said Amichai Shulman, chief technology officer at Imperva.

In the DoS attack Imperva observed, two Web servers were targeting an unnamed hosting provider based … Read more