Botnets Plus Spam Equals Trouble
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Criminals are adopting the principles of modern marketing to get their products onto users' computers.
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Sophisticated computer worm is setting up a botnet that may be hard to beat.
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Email threats are getting more and more sophisticated as spam, viruses, phishing, and spyware blend together. Learn how to thwart todays sophisticated blended threats.
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bulk messages clogging instant-messaging accounts. AOL and its Anti-Spam Alliance partners -- EarthLink, Microsoft, and Yahoo
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Marks host malware Booby-trapped web pages are growing at an alarming rate with unsuspecting firms acting for nurseries for botnet farmers, according to a new study.â¦
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Servers that managed global internet traffic have been subjected to a concerted attack by hackers.
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(InfoWorld) - Malware-infected botnet PCs have overtaken denial-of-service attacks as the top security issue facing Internet service providers and other Web infrastructure hosting players, according to a new survey of the organizations. Arbor Networks published the results of its third-annual Infrastructure Security Report on Monday -- a survey of 75 large ISPs, hosting companies, and other providers -- which found for the first time that botnets currently outrank DoS threats as the most serious concern for the firms. Tens of millions of PCs are likely infected with botnet programs worldwide, according to survey results, and Arbor researchers said the ISPs they questioned admitted to spending more time and resources battling botnets than ever before. Infrastructure providers are finding botnets hard to pin down, as the people responsible for controlling the zombie machines are increasingly employing more advanced detection evasion techniques, said Craig Labovitz, chief scientist at Arbor. As they can't accurately gauge the size of the problem, he said, infrastructure providers are afraid they're only scraping the tip of the iceberg in taking on the botnet phenomenon. "ISPs are spending a lot of time trying to measure, and there's a lot of subjective data, but there are such widely different qualities to the various bots that it's a real challenge to get any strong metrics," Labovitz said. "We are seeing a widening separation between the pros and the amateurs, but as easy as it is to infiltrate and measure the less sophisticated botnets, the pro grade stuff is far more problematic and harder to trace." By using the same peer-to-peer botnet propagation strategy that has made the so-called Storm worm a recurring problem in terms of generating subsequent infections, the sophisticated sect of the botnet community is moving forward at a rapid pace, according to Arbor. In eliminating the need for traditional botnet command and control centers using P2P techniques to distribute the threats, the attackers have also removed the most efficient place to attempt to take down the attacks, the researcher said. At the same time, denial-of-service (DoS) attacks -- which have long-ranked as the primary concern of ISPs and their brethren -- have not disappeared, but rather become more targeted and efficient in the application of their resources, making them even more damaging to their individual targets, according to the report. Labowitz said that while a traditional distributed DoS threats have measured at under 10GB, newer DoS attacks are reaching as high as 24GB -- enough to completely shut down a smaller ISP or Web server farm. As the attacks are getting more powerful, they are also being concentrated on smaller groups of individual targets, or groups of sites, versus being unleashed to the Internet at large. In one such situation just last week, Labowitz said, an unnamed gambling site was taken offline for a number of hours. "For the most part, if you read the press you don't hear about DoS as much, so people jump to the conclusion that it's not happening. But it's still out there," said the researcher. "The attacks may only be targeted at a small group of sites, but that can also help to increase the significance of the impact to the provider involved based on the more narrow focus." Despite the lingering threat of DoS, ISPs have become better equipped at warding off the attacks and protecting their customers, and often times have begun charging for premium services to address the issue, according to Arbor. As opposed to five years ago, when infrastructure players often had to scramble to respond to DoS campaigns as they emerged, Labowitz said most sizeable companies now have appropriate procedures and equipment to at least partially deflect the assaults. "Even though 90 percent of the attacks are a soft threat at this point, some of those remaining attacks are bigger than anyone can handle easily -- even some of the big guys," said Labowitz. Arbor predicts attacks on Internet telephony services will represent one of the next immediate pain points for infrastructure players. Only 20 percent of the companies surveyed for the report said they had any gear in place to detect VoIP threats. Only 11 percent reported that they had any plans or tools in place to mitigate VoIP-based attacks. "We haven't seen many of these threats yet, but we know the proof-of-concepts are out there," said Labowitz. "With the amount of VoIP infrastructure that is being deployed, the ISPs and telephony providers will need to ensure that they have something in place to protect those networks from attack."
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Shark Tank: Spam is heavy at this mortgage company, so a consultant is brought in to review six months of accumulated spam and set up an antispam appliance that should kill 98% of the junk. Everyone's happy. Then it goes live.
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Aggressive spam blasts against specific domains disrupt small and midsize businesses.
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Unknown DDoS tool, predecessors A deluge of Trojan-laced spam that slyly tricked recipients by promising information about winter storms ravaging Northern Europe last month was even more crafty than we thought.â¦
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Nasty squall New features of botnets created by the infamous Storm Worm allow denial of service attacks to be launched against security defenders that attempt to interrupt its operation.â¦
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Botnets helped keep spam output at consistently high levels last year, and global spam reached rates as high as 96% of all e-mail traffic during 2007.
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Spam mail has become one of the biggest problems on the Internet; it consumes precious bandwidth, wastes computer resources, and causes huge financial losses to corporations.
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Blog: Report says click fraud rate is up due to increased use of botnets to automate the clicking on ads.
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Security experts contend that a growing number of operators of compromised computer networks (or "botnets") are finding new ways to grow their networks and make them immune to potential shutdowns, including sophisticated fault-tolerance planning to help ensure that their networks can't be easily wiped out.ADVERTISEMENTIBM Information On Demand 2006Industrial Industry Leaders, please join us at IBM's premier information management global event, IBM Information On Demand 2006, October 15-20, Anaheim, CA. More IBM business and technical solutions content in one place than ever before! Select from  over 800 sessions. Register today!
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Sam blogs about his wiki spam problems  and implements a posting throttle.  With new spam-capable zombie PCs and with wikis that aren't updated very often this isn't a solution.  If I were to go back to my wiki after a month it would be covered with spam links.  One strong solution is emergent and distributed social whitelists (AKA my FOAFKey  proposal).  With a FOAFKey enabled wiki/weblog you could allow a whitelist of a few hundred thousand users to post to the wiki without any problems.  All they would need to enter is their email address for confirmation (or the SHA1 hash of their email).  For the rare times when the user isn't within the original whitelist we can just have the user uplo ...
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BOSTON - Computer viruses and worms will have to share the stage with a new challenger for the attention of attendees at a conference of antivirus researchers: spam e-mail.