Botnets linked to political hacking in Russia
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Traceroute Security researcher Jose Nazario has uncovered circumstantial evidence of the use of botnets in politically-motivated denial of service attacks.â¦
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Hacksplotation Organised crime is "grooming" a new generation of would-be cybercriminals using tactics which echo those used by the KGB to recruit operatives at the height of the cold war, according to a new blockbuster study by net security firm McAfee.â¦
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Semi-organized people just as dangerous as botnets In late April, a Russian-speaking blogger upset with recent events in Estonia posted a series of dispatches calling on like-minded people to attack government servers in that country.â¦
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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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A political battle is raging in Russian cyberspace. Opposition parties and independent media say murky forces have committed vast resources to hacking and crippling their Web sites in attacks similar to those that hit tech-savvy Estonia as the Baltic nation sparred with Russia over a Soviet war memorial.
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(InfoWorld) - From alleged poisonings to organized crime, Russia has been getting a lot of bad press lately. But this time the country -- or at least, the government -- may be in the clear. The string of crippling DDOS (distributed denial-of-service)Â attacks against EstoniaÂ didn't appear to be a coordinated attack by one entity within Russia, wrote Jose Nazario, senior security engineer with Arbor Networks, in a commentary. Estonia, a former satellite of the Soviet Union with a population of 1.3 million, came under intense electronic attacks around April 27, jamming up commercial and government Web sites. The attacks came as Estonia moved a World War II memorial of a statue of a Soviet soldier, igniting fierce protests. Although Russia was quickly accused, Russian government officials denied involvement. Difficulties in tracing the source of the DDOS attacks left more suspicions than facts. But further analysis throws doubt on whether a single agency alone was involved, given that the attacks came from computers around the world, Nazario wrote. While it is possible to spoof the origin of a DDOS attack, "none of the sources we have analyzed from around the world show a clear line from Moscow to Tallin," Estonia's capital, Nazario wrote. While the Russian government may have not been the single source, there is evidence that a number of Russian-speaking computer gurus may have joined in. Several Russian-language Web forums have information and scripts that would allow others to rig their computers to join in a DDOS attack, which involves sending massive streams of data to a Web site, causing it to crash. The scripts would cause a computer to send data to a Web site. "We see signs of Russian nationalism at work here, but no Russian government connection," Nazario wrote. This week has been fairly quiet, said Hillar Aarelaid, chief security officer for Estonia's Computer Emergency Response Team. "We have seen some attacks, but they are quite easy to handle," Aarelaid said, adding the DDOS attacks remain under investigation. Â
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A Republican Party Web site has been hacked, and for some time it has been spreading a variation of the long-running Storm Trojan horse to vulnerable visitors, a security researcher said Friday.
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More than 30,000 PCs per day are being recruited into secret networks that spread spam and viruses, a study shows. Six months ago only 2,000 Windows machines per day were being recruited into these so-called bot nets.
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Online criminals are exploiting human hopes and fears to spread spam and viruses.
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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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In one of the most significant hack attempts of the past few years, attackers tried to take down key parts of the Internet by targeting critical routing servers.
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Russia has been used as the launch-pad for a new wave of cyberattacks aimed at political and media organizations.
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Russia may soon prosecute the authors of the &quot;Pinch&quot; Trojan, an easy-to-use malicious software program available on the Internet that steals a variety of data.Nikolay Patrushev, who heads Russia&#39;s Federal Security Services, said earlier this week that Pinch&#39;s authors had been identified and would be taken to court, according to a blog posting by Russian security vendor Kaspersky Lab.Kaspersky said the arrest of the Pinch writers, identified as Ermishkin and Farkhutdinov, would be on the same level as the 2005 prosecution of German Sven Jaschan for creating the NetSky and Sasser worms, which caused thousands of infected computers to crash worldwide.With Pinch, &quot;it&#39;s impossible to estimate what financial losses have been caused over the years since this Trojan first saw the light of day,&quot; Kaspersky said.Pinch&#39;s sellers would customize the program for buyers and offer support, illustrating a growing underground economy for hacking tools, Kaspersky said.Thousands of versions of Pinch, which comes in Russian and English language versions, are still circulating on the Internet. Kaspersky said its security software can detect some 4,000 variants of Pinch, where the basic code is the same but aspects of the program have been modified in order to evade detection by security software.Pinch has a highly developed user interface that can be used for sorting information it steals off other computers, according to F-Secure.It can steal e-mail account passwords, pilfer other password information stored in the Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera browsers, and snap screenshots.That stolen information can also be encrypted before it is sent back to the hacker, according to Panda Security, another security vendor.Pinch could also be customized to have the victimized computer join a botnet, or a network of computers set up to hide other malicious activity by the hacker. Botnets are often used to send spam or mount other hacking attacks.
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Targeted spyware, network break-ins, and other digital crime pushes cyber espionage to a new level of concern.
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The sophisticated worm, known as W32.pipeline, is setting up a botnet and propagates when an AIM user clicks on a Web link apparently sent from someone in their buddy list.
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Shocking viking hacking Hi-tech scandal cast its shadow over last weekend's Swedish elections after the incumbent Social Democratic Party accused its political rivals, the Liberal party, of hacking into its systems. The Social Democrats reckons that "someone linked to the Liberal Party" broke into its internal network to swipe election strategy information, Dagens Industri via AFX reports. Police have been asked to investigate the source of "hundreds of incidents" of unauthorised access, following complaints from the Social Democrats.â¦
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New security software supplements antivirus protection by scanning systems for &#39;bot&#39; malware that can take over unprotected PCs.