From Gregg Keizer’s “Massive botnet returns from the dead, starts spamming” (Computerworld: 26 November 2008):
A big spam-spewing botnet shut down two weeks ago has been resurrected, security researchers said today, and is again under the control of criminals.
The “Srizbi” botnet returned from the dead late Tuesday, said Fengmin Gong, chief security content officer at FireEye [...]
Posted on November 27th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Tim Wilson’s “Researchers Link Storm Botnet to Illegal Pharmaceutical Sales” (DarkReading: 11 June 2008):
“Our previous research revealed an extremely sophisticated supply chain behind the illegal pharmacy products shipped after orders were placed on botnet-spammed Canadian pharmacy Websites. But the relationship between the technology-focused botnet masters and the global supply chain organizations was murky until [...]
Posted on November 23rd, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Chapter 2: Botnets Overview of Craig A. Schiller’s Botnets: The Killer Web App (Syngress: 2007):
Christopher Abad provides insight into the phishing economy in an article published online by FirstMonday.org (http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/ issue10_9/abad/). The article, “The economy of phishing: A survey of the operations of the phishing market,” reveals the final phase of the phishing life [...]
Posted on November 22nd, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Chapter 2: Botnets Overview of Craig A. Schiller’s Botnets: The Killer Web App (Syngress: 2007):
Most people can’t understand how anyone could make money sending out spam. It is the global scope of the Internet that makes it possible. When Jeremy Jaynes was arrested as one of the top ten spammers in the world authorities [...]
Posted on November 22nd, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Chapter 2: Botnets Overview of Craig A. Schiller’s Botnets: The Killer Web App (Syngress: 2007):
The first criminal case involving a botnet went to trial in November 2005. Jeanson James Ancheta (a. k. a. Resili3nt), age 21, of Downey, California, was convicted and sentenced to five years in jail for conspiring to violate the [...]
Posted on November 22nd, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s “Gathering ‘Storm’ Superworm Poses Grave Threat to PC Nets” (Wired: 4 October 2007):
Storm represents the future of malware. Let’s look at its behavior:
1. Storm is patient. A worm that attacks all the time is much easier to detect; a worm that attacks and then shuts off for a while [...]
Posted on November 22nd, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Charles C. Mann’s “Spam + Blogs = Trouble” (Wired: September 2006):
Some 56 percent of active English-language blogs are spam, according to a study released in May by Tim Finin, a researcher at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and two of his students. “The blogosphere is growing fast,” Finin says. “But the splogosphere is [...]
Posted on November 21st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Dennis Fisher’s “Storm, Nugache lead dangerous new botnet barrage” (SearchSecurity.com: 19 December 2007):
[Dave Dittrich, a senior security engineer and researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle], one of the top botnet researchers in the world, has been tracking botnets for close to a decade and has seen it all. But this new piece [...]
Posted on November 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Ryan Naraine’s “‘Pump-and-Dump’ Spam Surge Linked to Russian Bot Herders” (eWeek: 16 November 2006):
The recent surge in e-mail spam hawking penny stocks and penis enlargement pills is the handiwork of Russian hackers running a botnet powered by tens of thousands of hijacked computers.
Internet security researchers and law enforcement authorities have traced the operation to [...]
Posted on December 10th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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On Saturday 17 April 2004, I received the following email from someone I didn’t know:
> Hello,
>
> I am not sure who you are but our security detected a Netsky virus in an
> email that you sent. Whether a personal message or a spam, please make
> attention to the fact that you are spreading viruses and [...]
Posted on November 3rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Alex Mindlin’s “Seems Somebody Is Clicking on That Spam” (The New York Times: 3 July 2006):
Spam messages promoting pornography are 280 times as effective in getting recipients to click on them as messages advertising pharmacy drugs, which are the next most effective type of spam.
The third most successful variety is spam advertising Rolex watches, [...]
Posted on July 18th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Dennis Fisher’s Spammers’ New Tactic Upends DNS (eWeek: 10 January 2005):
One troublesome technique finding favor with spammers involves sending mass mailings in the middle of the night from a domain that has not yet been registered. After the mailings go out, the spammer registers the domain early the next morning.
By doing this, spammers hope [...]
Posted on June 16th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Robert Lemos’s Plague carriers: Most users unaware of PC infections (CNET News.com: 25 October 2004):
A study of home PCs released Monday found that about 80 percent had been infected with spyware almost entirely unbeknownst to their users.
The study, funded by America Online and the National Cyber Security Alliance, found home users mostly unprotected from [...]
Posted on June 14th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Byron Acohido and Jon Swartz’s “Going price for network of zombie PCs: $2,000-$3,000” (USA TODAY: 8 September 2004):
In the calculus of Internet crime, two of the most sought-after commodities are zombie PCs and valid e-mail addresses.
One indication of the going rate for zombie PCs comes from a June 11 posting on SpecialHam.com, an electronic [...]
Posted on June 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From The Inquirer’s “Killer phrase will fill your PC with spam”:
THERE IS ONE phrase which, if you type into any search engine will expose your PC to shed-loads of spam, according to a new report.
Researchers Ben Edelman and Hannah Rosenbaum reckon that typing the phrase “Free Screensavers” into any search engine is the equivalent of [...]
Posted on May 13th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Spam Daily News’s “Spam zombies from outer space“:
Spammers could soon use zombie computers in a totally new way. Infected computers could run programs that spy into a person’s email, mine it for information, and generate realistic-looking replies.
John Aycock, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Calgary, and his student Nathan [...]
Posted on May 12th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From John Schwartz’s “Text Hackers Could Jam Cellphones, a Paper Says“:
Malicious hackers could take down cellular networks in large cities by inundating their popular text-messaging services with the equivalent of spam, said computer security researchers, who will announce the findings of their research today.
Such an attack is possible, the researchers say, because cellphone companies provide [...]
Posted on April 28th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Slashdot’s “Pay-per-email and the ‘Market Myth’“:
But I think there’s a bigger problem underlying all of this. It’s not about specific problems with GoodMail’s or AOL’s or Hotmail’s system. The problem is that many advocates of these systems say that any flaws will get sorted out automatically by “the market” — and in this case [...]
Posted on April 4th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Computerworld’s “Army of zombies invades China“:
China’s rapid Internet growth has brought with it a somewhat disturbing side effect: multiplying zombies up to no good.
Zombies, or Internet-connected computers infected by worms or viruses and under the control of a hacker, are used to launch denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, or send spam or phishing e-mails. An average [...]
Posted on April 1st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From PC World’s “Britney Spears Ranked Top Virus Celebrity“:
Researchers combed through the seven years of virus-laden messages stored in Panda’s malware database to determine which celebrities most often had their names involuntarily used in association with malicious spam. …
The top ten list of celebrity virus rankings (in descending order) is: Britney Spears, Bill Gates, Jennifer [...]
Posted on July 8th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
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