FBI Nabs Three 'Bot Herders'
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FBI's ongoing 'Operation Bot Roast' has resulted in felony charges for three hackers accused of controlling botnets.
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Domains of several new phishing sites are cropping up with known Storm worm domains. F-Secure researchers think phishers are leasing parts of the larger botnet.
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FBI officials said they have netted close to $87 million worth of counterfeit software and components in California, Washington and Texas as a result of a sting operation called Operation Digital Marauder.
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Federal prosecutors unsealed indictments yesterday of three Indian nationals who allegedly used stolen passwords to hijack the online brokerage accounts of scores of U.S. investors, a scheme that resulted in more than $2 million in losses, authorities said.
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The FBI on Thursday added the names of nine Chinese people and one other man to the list of those being sought for questioning about a possible terror plot targeting Boston.
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Three of the 13 computers used to manage global internet traffic are hacked overnight. It's one of the biggest attacks since 2002. By the Associated Press.
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According to the Symantec report, there is a sharp rise in so-called &quot;bot networks&quot; of compromised PCs that are used by hackers to launch denial-of-service attacks.
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Three men accused of trying to obtain secret defense information and stolen military equipment to send to Yemen were indicted Thursday, federal prosecutors said.
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As the United States' presidential candidates pinball their way across New Hampshire on the day of the state's closely watched primary elections, a new form of grassroots activism appears to be taking root across the Atlantic, in Eastern Europe, that melds dirty pool tactics with the cutting edge of malware technology.Researchers with carrier security specialists Arbor Networks claim that they recently discovered several additional incidents of botnet-driven DOS attacks that were tied to political issues. Danny McPherson, chief research officer at Arbor, will report his group's findings to the assembled computer security and law enforcement experts at next week's Department of Defense Cyber-crime conference in St. Louis.Since April 2007, when a campaign of targeted denial-of-service (DOS) attacks against Web sites controlled by the prime minister of Estonia and several regional banks were carried out with crushing results -- crippling the URLs for a period of several days -- experts have wondered aloud to what extent politics played a hand in the scheme.At the time, press reports and IT security experts speculated that tension between Estonia and Russia -- sparked by Estonia's decision to move a Soviet-era World War II memorial of a bronze soldier -- may have motivated the coordinated DOS attacks. With a number of well-known malware distribution and botnet control networks based out of the region, experts speculated that Russian hackers, either on their own or at the behest of a paying customer, took out the Estonian sites to display their displeasure with the statue's removal.Now new evidence has been discovered that indicates the same sort of political activism believed to have driven the 2007 Estonian Web site attacks not only exists but is becoming more popular."We spent some time after the Estonia attacks looking into this part of the world, and we've found evidence of other politically motivated botnet DOS attacks," said Jose Nazario, senior software engineer at Arbor. "It's hard to tell who is responsible for these campaigns, but they definitely appear to be tied to some recent Russian and Ukrainian elections."According to Nazario, who is known as an expert tracker of botnets -- the armies of malware-infected computers that can be controlled remotely to be used for everything from DOS campaigns to the distribution of spam -- two elections in particular appear to have drawn activity similar to the Estonia incidents.In one instance, Nazario said his team uncovered a botnet-driven DOS threat carried out against several Web sites controlled by Viktor Yanukovych, the recently defeated Ukranian prime minister, during his re-election campaign.In another incident, Nazario said that his team was able to discover a DOS campaign aimed at sites controlled by the "Other Russia" political party led by one-time 2008 Russian presidential candidate Garry Kasparov, who is more widely known as one of the greatest chess players of all time.During each of the individual attacks, banks of botnet-infected computers successfully took the candidates' sites down for several days before they were restored, according to Arbor.Additionally, Nazario said the botnets used in both sets of attacks represent the cutting-edge of the increasingly popular and sophisticated malware sub-genre.Rather than using IRC relays to communicate with each other like most traditional botnets, the politically driven threats utilized Web-based requests to speak to each other -- a much harder form of traffic to differentiate from legitimate network throughput, Nazario said.The same advanced botnets are currently being used to distribute malware and spam, but the systems also appear to have been specifically designed to help their controllers carry out different types of distributed DOS attacks, he said.Nazario said the botnets being used in Russia and the Ukraine closely resembled the zombie PC armies that have been used in years past to attack anti-spam efforts such as Spamhaus and CastleCops -- both of which have previously been targeted successfully and had their sites temporarily taken offline.The activity could also suggest that the systems are being rented out by their creators to other people for the purpose of executing their own threats -- or being built through botnet toolkit technologies being developed in the region, the expert said.Whether or not botnet activism will wash ashore in the U.S. any time soon remains unclear, but it seems apparent the trend is taking off across the pond.Nazario said it remains hard to tell if the botnet campaign tactic has become a weapon of official political entities, or merely a tool of groups acting independently to promote some cause or belief, but lean towards the latter scenario."We don't know who is behind any of this activity, and we don't want to speculate, but you have to ask yourself, is this directed by someone higher in the political organizations, or is it merely somebody who is acting as a lone vigilante?" Nazario said. "It could be that this is something that is being carried out by a handful of individuals that have some sort of belief or disagreement to promote, or it could of course represent something bigger."
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Federal officials are trying to prosecute operators of Web sites that recruit terrorists.
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Blog: Some federal government Web sites, including the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, are trying to remain hidden online by blocking search engines from indexing them. Not only is this lame, but it's a good reason to ignore their robots.txt fi
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Authorities nab two men suspected of having unleashed 1.6 billion unsolicited e-mails and then profiting from the responses.
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Sept 13 issue - One measure of how seriously the Feds are pursuing an investigation into whether a Pentagon analyst leaked secret information to a pro-Israel lobbying group is the fact that FBI agents showed up unannounced at the offices of the American
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Sophisticated computer worm is setting up a botnet that may be hard to beat.
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WASHINGTON  --  Hackers briefly overwhelmed at least three of the 13 computers that help manage global computer traffic Tuesday in one of the most significant attacks against the Internet since 2002.
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As high-tech thieves loot cash machines around the country, the FBI's man inside gets close to the Russian kingpin behind the crime wave. Second of a three-part series by Kim Zetter.Plus: I Was a Cybercrook for the FBI
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The Stop Badware team targets, defeats some malware distributors and zombie recruiters.