Sometimes it seems that the dark side is leading in the development of new technology. Technical journals and reports abound with examples. Last week there was a reference to quality control services for malware makers in a report from Cisco. The report cited a Russian site that for a fee tests malicious files against the [...]
Archive for the 'Botnets' Category
Warren Franklin, a fellow cyber crime fighter, writes this morning, … you shouldn’t be too surprised to learn that there is a new malware trick. It’s called “quality assurance.” Malware distributors are outsourcing for quality assurance going to sites like virtest.com. According to Cisco, for a fee the site tests malicious files against the latest [...]
Fake Software: Cybercrime product of the year
Published by July 18th, 2009 in Botnets, CyberCrime, Viruses and Worms & Trojans. 0 CommentsIn its midyear report on cyber security, Cisco Systems names rogue anti-virus software the cybercrime product of the year. There is a lot of great software that you can get for little or nothing from the freeware and shareware communities. There is also a lot of very dangerous free software being pushed by cyber criminals. [...]
A new digital age vocabulary word has just been coined: “botnetweb.“ You know what a botnet is: a collection of hijacked PCs under the control of a hacker (botmaster). Link a bunch of botnets together and you get a botnetweb, a compilation of millions of PCs. In a PC World article published yesterday, Ed Larkin [...]
October, I learned this morning, is National Cyber Security Awareness Month. So cyber criminals now have their own month. And why not. Criminal gangs now own a huge chunk of the Internet, simply by silently taking control of millions of PCs owned by individuals and small businesses. So they deserve a little special recognition. Never [...]
Happy birthday, America
Published by July 4th, 2008 in Botnets, CyberCrime and Worms & Trojans. 0 CommentsToday, we Americans celebrate Independence Day…our 232nd birthday. It’s a day of parades, family get-togethers, barbecues, and fireworks. A day for relaxing and fun. A day for reflecting on the wonder of the American experiment. Cyber-crooks will be launching some fireworks of their own, flooding cyberspace with millions of booby-trapped e-greeting cards. Experts are expecting [...]
Google “Kraken” and you’ll learn that the name refers to a legendary giant sea monster capable of swallowing up whole ships. It’s also the name of a new bot worm that swallows up personal computers by the hundreds of thousands, according to a story from Dark Reading. The article, published in April 2008, claims the [...]
A little over two years ago, Red Herring magazine published an article on the rise of computer zombies. It quoted a report by anti-spam company CypherTrust that 172,000 computer users were losing control of their machines every day. That was a startling statistic. It meant that criminals were building botnets at a staggering rate. Two [...]