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Microsoft, Internet Pirates and Web 2.0+
Blog Beyond the easy to appreciate theft of massive distributed CPU cycles while riding on millions of users' computers, the bot-nets also consume tremendous chunks of Internet bandwidth with their email spam, malware and server crashing behavior.
[June 10, 2009, 4:57]
Official: Cybercrime is growing
Talkback Whether spam or bot or phish or pharm, all we need is to pay attention to the technology information scraps, and, above all, to the activity in the proverbial garages of California, that seedbed of innovation.
[April 11, 2005, 19:46]
FBI announces botnet milestone
News The amusingly named Operation Bot Roast, being carried out in conjunction with Carnegie Mellon University, Microsoft and the International Botnet Task Force, is an initiative aimed at revealing the scale of the botnet problem and prosecuting those...
[June 14, 2007, 11:13]
Storm worm spammers exploit Halo 3 buzz
News Marshal's Anstis said this scam could herald the rise of outsourced bot-herding whereby the botnet controller pays a third party to acquire further bots. For example, if I own a Trojan network, I pay you 20 cents per bot you get me," Anstis noted.
[October 10, 2007, 8:44]
Wikipedia needs help to keep growing
News Spambots are particularly problematic for smaller Wikipedia projects that are not able to constantly monitor the site and block the bot before it causes too much damage. This is generally a minor problem -- when the bot starts to insert links we...
[March 1, 2005, 14:40]
Experts gather for cybercrime conference
News But criminals are organising better and moving to more sophisticated tactics, including the use of peer-to-peer technologies in their bot software. Authorities are cracking down and have had successes in catching, prosecuting and convicting...
[January 22, 2007, 15:11]
The real cost of the Coreflood botnet
News If the user also chanced to be on the corporate network when that happened, the bot would then be able to take advantage of that structure and be a threat to everyone on that network. What he found was not only the bot's source code but also 50GB...
[November 10, 2008, 9:51]
Spam volume rises despite hosting-company closure
News McColo was hosting command and control servers that were being used to send instructions — for example, to send spam or Trojans — to bot software that had been planted on PCs, mostly in the US, according to Sergeant.
[November 27, 2008, 11:08]
Towards Automating Malware Classification and Characterization
White Papers Most spam messages are currently sent out by captured machines organized in bot networks, which are infected with malicious software and are therefore under direct control of spammers. Spam has become a problem of global impact.
[June 20, 2009, 1:21]
Experts clash over merits of anti-spam authentication
Talkback Fitzgerald says that SPF is "breakable" by having bot nets no longer forge email addresses is kind of silly. It is not designed to tell you if any given email is spam or not. While a lot of spam uses forged email addresses, and thus SPF failures...
[October 10, 2005, 17:37]
Experts clash over merits of anti-spam authentication
News A spam-bot could easily pull popular MUA client settings for its own use, use process injection to usurp the installed MUA, use similar techniques to usurp the network stack, and protect itself with a rootkit," Fitzgerald said.
[October 10, 2005, 15:05]
Botnets lead way in spam charge
News According to the messaging security specialist, the biggest botnet currently is Cutwail, which has doubled in size and output per bot since March. Spam made up 90.4 percent of all email traffic in June, with botnets accounting for over 80 percent...
[July 1, 2009, 12:57]
The Passing Storm: The Storm/Nuwar Botnet
White Papers While security software can mitigate the direct impact of Nuwar and other bot-related malware on individual systems, the wider effects of botnet activity need additional countermeasures. Local monitoring and blocking of SMTP traffic from systems...
[June 20, 2009, 1:21]
New Bagle opens another spam backdoor
News Such "bot" software can be used by spammers and more dangerous online denizens to disrupt access to Web sites or collect personal financial information. Unknown online vandals with an apparent connection to spam email have created a new version of...
[July 16, 2004, 8:35]
FSC Software Pack
Downloads FSBot: Lichen, AOL instant messenger bot, only as smart as you make it. Splocker is an AIM spam blocker, for those of you who like to play in AIM chat rooms this will prevent people who are sending you spam messages from getting to you!
[March 5, 2004, 7:00]
'Spim' threat hovers on horizon
Talkback In the end I actually had a good 5 sentence discussion about how I thought they were a 'bot' and then they sent me the spam link. What's a bot? I used to get Spim all the time on Yahoo! Messenger, some were clearly "bots".
[April 4, 2004, 5:38]
China leads Asia in malicious online activity
News China's bot-infected computers made up 78 percent of those in the region. According to Symantec's biannual internet security threat report released on Wednesday, China topped the Asia-Pacific region, including Japan, in malicious activity...
[September 20, 2007, 8:25]
Encrypted bots could be the next threat
News Botnets are often rented out by their owners, called bot herders, to relay spam and launch phishing scams to steal sensitive personal data for fraud. Once it is installed on a PC, bot software typically connects to Internet Relay Chat to listen for...
[November 15, 2005, 9:55]
Zombie networks implicated in ID theft
News A person whose computer is infected with bot software runs the risk of having sensitive information such as account passwords and credit card numbers sent to the controller of the network. At least a million computers worldwide are unwitting hosts...
[March 15, 2005, 8:15]
Botnets and spyware still on the rise
News Incidents involving the malicious code, also known as bot code, reached 13,000 from April through June, according to a report from antivirus-software maker McAfee. McAfee estimated that 63 percent more machines were exploited by bot programs and by...
[July 12, 2005, 14:20]
