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Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have become an everyday or, some might argue, an hourly problem. Using a variety of techniques, a wide range of threat actors from lone hackers, criminal gangs and hacktivists, to nation-states have and are using DDoS attacks. These attacks are carried out to degrade or disable the performance and network communications of target systems. These targets can be small or large businesses, internet service providers, manufacturers, retailers, healthcare providers, schools and universities, or other nation-states. Essentially, any entity with an online presence can become a DDoS target. Now, here is the why. There are...

Prague/Brno, Feb 15 (CTK) - Czech security experts have uncovered a global network of devices attacked by computer viruses within which it was possible to wiretap and gain access to sensitive data, Jan Vykopal, head of the security project of Masaryk University, told CTK yesterday. Modems were among the attacked devices as they are only poorly protected. The viruses were able to deflect the communication of Internet users to servers where they could be wiretapped, Vykopal said. Vykopal's colleagues along with experts from the Brno Military Academy and the Defence Ministry have uncovered the dangerous network. "The assailants have denoted...

Chalk up one for the defenders. Here’s how a trio of security researchers used a three-step attack to defeat a 250,000-pronged botnet.For two years as a researcher with security company FireEye, Atif Mushtaq worked to keep Mega-D bot malware from infecting clients' networks. In the process, he learned how its controllers operated it. Last June, he began publishing his findings online. In November, he suddenly switched from de fense to offense. And Mega-D--a powerful, resilient botnet that had forced 250,000 PCs to do its bidding--went down. Mushtaq and two FireEye colleagues went after Mega-D's command infrastructure. A botnet's first wave...

Botnets Tighten Defenses Year After McColo Shutdown (Only a link can be posted per FR rules.)

Virus hunters are raising the alarm for a large-scale spam attack that uses fake Facebook password-reset messages to trick PC users into downloading a dangerous piece of malware. The malicious executable is linked to the Bredolab botnet, which has been linked to massive spam runs and identity-theft related attacks. Here’s a sample of the Facebook password-reset messages hitting e-mail inboxes this morning: According to Websense, the address of the sender is spoofed to display “support@facebook.com,” a trick commonly used to trick targets into believing it’s a legitimate e-mail from the popular social network. The messages contain a .zip file attachment...

Cisco boffins infiltrate a botnet to find out about online crime By posing as a rogue programmer, Cisco researchers gained a unique insight into the world of botnets and their owners Poor education, a criminal record and a dislike of authority can all turn programmers bad. That's the finding of Cisco researchers who posed as botmasters to enter the world of online crime. "I wanna do what I wanna do, whenever I want," one botmaster told the researchers. By posing online as a rogue programmer, the researchers got him to reveal how he spams thousands of instant messenger users with...

In the dark world of the cybercriminal economy, computer viruses battle not just against anti-virus security software, but even other strains of malware for control of infected PCs, security researchers said. A strain of Trojan malware identified as Bredo contains code that disables the Zeus/Zbot Trojan and moves files to prevent Zeus from reinstalling itself on reboot, according to security researchers from Sophos. Malware authors have previously targeted other malware as a way to keep PCs under their control and not controlled by a rival bot herder. The cybercriminals use networks of infected PCs - called botnets - to distribute...

Some scareware scammers building botnets, too (USA Today can only be linked to) Previous article: New twist on scareware locks up your PC

Damballa - Small Botnets Pose Big Problems to Enterprises A research by security firm 'Damballa' indicates that it isn't necessary the largest sized botnets, which are responsible for the greatest threat, pose great threat to corporate data. During an analysis of 600 or more active botents, the firm's research experts found that often small sized infected networks were employed for the more targeted and dangerous attacks. Damballa states that although massive botnets like Conficker and Rustock are frequently in seen in the news, its study paper released during September 2009 indicates that many organizations become targets of attacks from even...

Scientists at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, have run more than a million Linux kernels as virtual machines.The technique will allow them to effectively observe behaviour found in malicious botnets, or networks of infected machines that can operate on the scale of a million nodes. One of the researchers Ron Minnich, said they are often difficult to analyze since they are geographically spread all over the world. However using virtual machine and a Thunderbird supercomputing cluster for the demonstration, the team was able to run VMS at a similar scale as a botnet. This  allows cyber researchers to watch how...

Scourge - Programs hiding on the Internet can take over a computer and make it send spam or perform other evil acts REDMOND, Wash. -- In a windowless room on Microsoft's campus in Redmond, T.J. Campana, a cybercrime investigator, connects an unprotected computer running an early version of Windows XP to the Internet. In less than a minute the computer is "owned." An automated program lurking on the Internet has remotely taken over the PC and turned it into a "zombie." That computer and other zombie machines are then assembled into systems called "botnets" -- home and business PCs hooked...

A criminal gang is using software tools normally reserved for computer network administrators to infect thousands of PCs in corporate and government networks with programs that steal passwords and other information, a security researcher has found. The new form of attack indicates that little progress has been made in defusing the threat of botnets, networks of infected computers that criminals use to send spam, steal passwords and do other forms of damage, according to computer security investigators. Several security experts say that although attacks against network administrators are not new, the systematic use of administrative software to spread malicious software...

Excerpts - ... 1. Make ISPs (and all organizations providing computer access to more than 100 people) responsible for filtering scan and attack traffic across their networks. ... 2. Make ISPs (and all organizations providing computer access to more than 100 people) responsible for knocking customer PCs off their network if they become bots. ... 3. Make end users liable if losses are incurred because of outdated security software. ... 4. Write some kind of law concerning efficient security software. ...

Bot Networks What could you do if you controlled a network of thousands of computers -- or, at least, could use the spare processor cycles on those machines? You could perform massively parallel computations: model nuclear explosions or global weather patterns, factor large numbers or find Mersenne primes, or break cryptographic problems. All of these are legitimate applications. And you can visit distributed.net and download software that allows you to donate your spare computer cycles to some of these projects. (You can help search for Optimal Golomb Rulers -- even if you have no idea what they are.) You've got...

LOS ANGELES - A 21-year-old computer whiz was sentenced to nearly five years in federal prison for taking control of 400,000 Internet-connected computers and renting access to them to spammers and fellow hackers. Among the machines authorities said Jeanson James Ancheta infected in 2004 and 2005 were those at the China Lake Naval Air Facility and the Defense Information System Agency headquartered in Falls Church, Va. "Your worst enemy is your own intellectual arrogance that somehow the world cannot touch you on this," U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner told Ancheta in sentencing him Monday to 57 months in prison....