botnet

Microsoft's announcement, through the lawyer who runs its Digital Crimes Unit, that it took down another botnet was incomplete. It forgot to mention that Kaspersky Labs took down the botnet while Microsoft stood around to hand it tools and try to look useful.

Microsoft has opened a front in its ongoing battle against Internet scammers, using the power of a U.S. court to deal a knockout blow to an emerging botnet and taking offline a provider of free Internet domains.

If banks can put dye packs and broadcasting GPS units that signal cops where stolen moneybags are being taken, why can't you do that for data? Honeypot technology shows you how, but existing honeytokens have to be better at sending calls for help.

Researchers gain access to one of the world's largest spam botnets, and find it's an operation that as organized and crafty as any successful corporation

For more than 24 hours this week, it was a question that very few security experts could answer: Who had knocked the world's worst spam botnet offline?

Botnet makers are shifting from front-line crime to software development, renting their product to anyone with money to pay and mayhem to make.

2010 was a great year for botnets, particularly for the cyber criminals who run them. A report released Tuesday by security firm Damballa finds new botnets cropped up at a record pace in 2010.

The Storm/Waldec botnet may be behind a new spam campaign that was recently launched to kick off 2011. According to researchers with Shadowserver Foundation, the campaign is designed to look like a New Year's-themed e-card. Users receive a message that says "Charley has created a New Year e-card. To view this page please click here." The user is then directed to a server that asks them to download a Flash player, which in turn installs malware onto the user's machine.

Rustock remains the most dominant botnet on the spam scene, with spam output that more than doubled since last year, according to new research from Symantec in its annual MessageLabs Intelligence 2010 Security Report. In 2010, Rustock was responsible for more than 44 billion spam emails per day and had more than one million bots under its control. Botnets Grum and Cutwail are the second and third largest respectively, the report said.

The Scottish botnet spammer found guilty last month for carrying out a malicious Trojan campaign in 2006 has been sentenced to 18 months in prison.

Aimed at smaller companies the DNS-server failover service is more of an insurance policy than for big companies, which expect to be hit with big, expensive attacks.

In addition to taxing and quarantining botnet-infected customers (as well as being distant and offputting as usual), Microsoft offers a malware site with unusually cogent anti-bot advice.