infected computers

Microsoft says it has significantly disrupted, though perhaps not destroyed, a major network of infected computers (also known as a 'botnet'). It's estimated those behind the scheme have generated $2.7 million a month in revenue. The ZeroAccess ... botnet is thought to involve more than two million computers infected with a kind of malware that allows cybercriminals to remotely control these systems. Rather than try to steal personal data from the computers, the operators used this control to run a major advertising scam. In effect, the operators set up websites to sell pay-per-click advertising ... (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)

An international security campaign has taken down Grum, a hacker-controlled botnet responsible for the daily release of 18 billion spam emails. The takedown effort began two weeks ago, when authorities in the Netherlands pulled the plug on Grum's ... two main servers. Other servers in Panama went offline earlier this week. Grum's last servers were disconnected in Russia, effectively killing the botnet. Group Effort Stops Grum The demise of the Grum botnet was confirmed by security vendor FireEye in a recent blog post. Grum's termination apparently resulted from a group effort. To kill the ... (view more)

People whose computers are infected with the ' DNS Changer ' virus will lose access to the Internet on Monday, July 9, 2012, unless they take steps to remedy the situation. Right now the Federal Bureau of Investigation is wrapping up an operation ... designed to help such victims maintain their online connections. DNS Changer is named after the domain name system that helps translate website addresses (such as www.infopackets.com ) into a string of numbers known as an IP address, which is the way computers actually identify the machine where a particular website is physically stored. 'DNS Changer ... (view more)