botnet

According to a new report, nearly one in every eight home networks in North America is infected with malware. Experts consider about half of those threats to be "serious." The study comes from Mountain View, California's Kindsight Security Labs. In ... its third-quarter malware report, the company indicates that 13 per cent of all home networks are infected. Kindsight's report suggests that about 6.5 per cent of these infections are serious enough to have converted the computers on the infected network into a botnet , or are capable of compromising a user's information security. ZeroAccess Botnet ... (view more)

The man convicted of infecting 72,000 computers has been sentenced to two and a half years behind bars. Joshua Schichtel created a network of hijacked machines and then -- for a fee -- allowed others to control them. Schichtel first came to the ... attention of authorities in 2004. At the time, he was part of a group charged with using infected computers to carry out distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Earlier DDoS Attack Goes Unpunished Under a DDosS attack, a hacker uses many computers to send service requests to legitimate website servers. Because servers are set up to respond to all ... (view more)

Rumors of a rampant Android-based botnet that is spamming individuals around the world are now proving to be unfounded. Instead, experts have discovered that Yahoo Mail may have been compromised. Rumors of an Android-based botnet first began ... circulating last week. Reportedly, the botnet was sending out waves of pharmacy, penny stock, and e-card spam emails. Terry Zink, a program manager for Microsoft's Forefront security product team, added credibility to the rumors by claiming, "a spammer has control of a botnet that lives on Android devices. These devices login to user's Yahoo Mail account ... (view more)

Doctor Web, a Russian antivirus company, recently announced its discovery of covert, zero-day-exploiting Trojan Horse malware which it believes has infiltrated more than 600,000 Macintosh systems worldwide. A number of other security companies later ... confirmed that staggering figure is probably accurate. "Flashback" Trojan Largest Mac Botnet Ever Doctor Web originally estimated that more than half a million machines were infected with "Flashback." This particular instance of malware gets installed on an unsuspecting user's computer during a visit to a previously-compromised website. Once ... (view more)

Security experts at Kaspersky Lab, one of the leading anti-virus and computer security firms, recently announced they were able to take control of a hacker-built botnet containing more than 100,000 compromised computers. Unfortunately, less than 24 ... hours after the successful takedown, Kelihos, the cybercriminal gang behind the botnet, has already started building a new, large-scale collection of compromised computers to replace the one taken down. To stop the initial botnet, Kaspersky specialists used a method called "sinkholing." This technique involves direct infiltration of the botnet's ... (view more)

Security officials have discovered a new botnet of infected computers capable of tremendous online destruction. Computers around the world have become infected in droves thanks to a steady stream of malicious email attachments that have continued to ... be released on a daily basis since August. At its most volatile, a record high 25 billion malicious attachments were sent out in a single day in August, alone. Botnet Delivers Altered Scam Those responsible for the attacks have had to alter their deceitful strategies several times to expand their list of victims. The first wave of malicious emails ... (view more)

Microsoft is offering a $250,000 reward for information regarding the owners of the Rustock spam botnet , despite the fact the it has already been neutralized. Rustock at one point infected an estimated one million computers. Those behind it used ... the network to send as many as 30 million spam messages a day, most commonly selling counterfeit drugs. (Source: latimes.com ) Although the botnet has been brought under control, there's still a threat because its creators remain at large. As a result, Microsoft has issued a bounty. The reward is $250,000 and will be paid to anyone who provides "new ... (view more)

Around 4.5 million computers have been caught in a botnet that some experts are calling as good as indestructible. Others, however, say that's an exaggeration. The botnet in question is named the TDL-4. In many senses, it's like any other botnet: ... once a computer becomes infected with malicious software, it is now controlled by remote and used for nefarious purposes. Many times the zombie PCs in a botnet (also known as a " botnet army ") are used to send bogus page requests to websites in an attempt to knock them offline --; referred to as a " denial of service attack ", or ... (view more)

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has made two announcements about successful operations against online bandits. The first is a near-complete takedown of a widespread virus, while the second is a series of arrests and seizures relating to ... two separate cybercrime gangs responsible for scareware scams. The virus in question had allowed criminals to set up a botnet . In short, a botnet is a large network of virus-infected PCs which is remotely controlled by one or a few individuals. The infected PCs are typically used to attack websites, send spam (unsolicited bulk email) to users around ... (view more)

The FBI and Justice Department have shut down a network of infected Windows machines used for stealing money. The 'Coreflood' botnet was one of the largest and most longstanding networks of its type. Despite the network shutdown, the malicious ... software used to infect PCs remains in the wild. Over 2 Million PCs Infected with Malicious Software The botnet at one point held control over two million PCs which were infected by malicious software, often downloaded unknowingly by users online the Internet. The malicious software (also known as "malware") easily penetrated Windows defenses ... (view more)