botnet

An employee at Spanish antivirus firm Panda Security received a new Android-based Vodafone HTC Magic with malware on it, according to researchers at Panda Labs.

"Today one of our colleagues received a brand new Vodafone HTC Magic with Google's Android OS," researcher Pedro Bustamante wrote on the Panda Research Blog on Monday.

"The interesting thing is that when she plugged the phone to her PC via USB, her Panda Cloud Antivirus went off, detecting both an autorun.inf and autorun.exe as malicious," he wrote. "A quick look into the phone quickly revealed it … Read more

Authorities in Spain have arrested three men accused of operating a massive botnet composed of 12.7 million PCs that stole credit card and bank log-in data and infected computers in half of the Fortune 1,000 companies and more than 40 banks, according to published reports.

The botnet "Mariposa," which means butterfly in Spanish, first appeared in December 2008 and grew to be one of the largest botnets ever, The Associated Press reported. It spread the Butterfly worm via removable drives, MSN Messenger, and peer-to-peer programs and targets Windows XP and older systems.

Unlike many underground hackers, … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--In his keynote at the RSA security conference on Tuesday, Scott Charney, Microsoft's corporate vice president of Trustworthy Computing, suggested that the security industry should follow the health care model of quarantining infected PCs to prevent them from being used to send spam and conduct denial-of-service attacks.

In a follow-up interview afterward, Charney elaborated on his vision for reducing the damage from botnets and explains how infected computers should be kept off the Internet just like doctors quarantine sick people and smokers are restricted as to where they can light up in public.

Q: So you teased us … Read more

Spam now accounts for close to 90 percent of all e-mail worldwide due to a surge in February, according to Symantec.

Two botnets named Grum and Rustock helped push spam levels up 5.5 percent in February over the prior month, according to the security firm's report (PDF). After doing business as usual over the past year, Grum suddenly sprang to life in February, increasing the amount of spam it generated by 51 percent. As a result, the botnet is now to blame for 26 percent of all global spam.

Rustock also surged last month, pushing up global spam … Read more

The attacks on Google and others late last year weren't as sophisticated as initially believed and appear to have cropped up last summer, according to a report to be released Tuesday by security firm Damballa.

Damballa is just the latest company to analyze the attacks and offer an opinion. McAfee dubbed the attacks "Operation Aurora" and said they were highly complex and advanced.

"While 'Aurora' was a very damaging attack that breached some of the most sophisticated networks in the world, it is a 'garden variety' botnet and can be traced back to July 2009, when … Read more

Microsoft is intent on eliminating the Waledac botnet and is using the legal system to help.

Tim Cranton, Microsoft's associate general counsel, wrote Thursday on the company's blog that Microsoft has been shutting down Waledac by working with technology partners and taking legal action.

In response to a complaint filed by Microsoft, a federal judge issued on Monday a temporary restraining order to shut down 227 Internet domains believed to be run by cybercriminals spreading the Waledac spambot.

This week's legal takedown of Waledac, known internally at Microsoft as "Operation b49," came after months of … Read more

More than 74,000 PCs at nearly 2,500 organizations around the globe were compromised over the past year and a half in a botnet infestation designed to steal login credentials to bank sites, social networks, and e-mail systems, a security firm said Wednesday.

The systems were infected with the Zeus Trojan and the botnet was dubbed "Kneber" after a username that linked the infected PCs on corporate and government systems, according to NetWitness.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Merck, Cardinal Health, Paramount Pictures, and Juniper Networks were among the targets in the attack. NetWitness speculated that … Read more

Malware-carrying spam and attacks via Twitter and Facebook grew dramatically in the second half of 2009, says a report (PDF) released Tuesday by security company M86 Security.

The volume of spam shot up last year to more than 200 billion messages each day, or 80 percent to 90 percent of all inbound e-mail sent to organizations, said M86. Spam carrying malware also surged in the second half of the year, hitting 3 billion each day compared with 600 million per day in the first half of 2009.

The vast majority of spam is now sent through botnets hiding on infected … Read more

When botnets do battle for your desktop, you lose. But we still find it kind of cool. Google Buzz on the other hand, we're not so sure about -- mainly because we just want to try it out and it turns out we've now been opted in to all kinds of public information and sharing our email addresses and all this weird stuff. But I guess if Google gave is gigabit-per-second Internet access, we might feel better about things. Oh, and Warner Music is turning into a bird. Long story. --Molly