Posts Tagged ‘botnet’
Employee creates Bitcoin botnet to exploit ESEA’s 500,000-member gaming community
Author: James Cliff
The ESEA gaming network has been exploiting its users’ powerful graphics cards to mine Bitcoins without their knowledge. The mining began on April 13th and affected thousands of gamers, who unwittingly mined over $ 3,700 worth of the currency. ESEA, which describes itself as “the largest competitive video gaming community in North America,” wasn’t aware that the Bitcoin mining was taking place, and blames the behavior on a rogue employee out for personal gain.
The full story on how and why the Bitcoin-mining software made its way to users’ computers isn’t yet available, but ESEA had been exploring the idea of adding a Bitcoin mining option to its client. The idea was canned on April 12th, but the next day, the rogue employee secretly…
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Tags: 500000member, BitCoin, botnet, Community, creates, employee, ESEA's, exploit, Gaming | 
No Comments »Microsoft disrupts millions of botnet connections after discovering PCs with preloaded malware
Author: Brian McKinnell
Microsoft disclosed this week that it has helped interrupt more than 500 different strains of malware in an attempt to slow the emerging threat of the Nitol botnet. In an operation codenamed b70, Microsoft uncovered stores in China selling computers with counterfeit models of Windows loaded with malware. Part of an unsecure supply chain, the malware-equipped models of Windows could have been installed at any sort of component of a process when a computer system travels with different business that ship and market it.
In a research focusing on the Nitol botnet, Microsoft uncovered that 20 percent of the Computers its researchers bought from an unsecure supply chain in numerous cities in China were infected with malware. Microsoft is calling on …
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Tags: after, botnet, connections, discovering, disrupts, malware, Microsoft, Millions, PreLoaded |
No Comments »How the world’s largest spam botnet was brought down
Author: Heather Brown
Eight months ago, the Grum botnet was estimated to be the largest in the world, pumping out a third of the global volume of spam email. But things changed over the following six months as Atif Mushtaq, senior staff scientist at security firm FireEye, noticed an abrupt drop in the number of active command-and-control servers — the network’s nerve centers — and sensed the perfect time to mount an offensive. Thanks to a coordinated, global attack, the infestation shriveled to 20,000 zombies; infected computers awaiting instructions that will never come. TechCrunch takes an informative look at how Grum operated, and how a weakness in its code allowed some determined spam fighters to take it permanently offline.
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Kelihos botnet suspect ‘surprised and shocked’ at Microsoft accusations
Author: Stefanie Jenkins
Microsoft named former antivirus worker Andrey Sabelnikov as a suspect in its Kelihos botnet case earlier this week, leaving him surprised at the decision. Sabelnikov, a 31-year-old Russian, insisted in a blog post today that he is “absolutely not guilty,” and plans to prove his innocence in court after being “surprised and shocked” at the accusation. Microsoft presented evidence on Monday, in an amended complaint with a US District Court, that Sabelnikov “wrote the code for and either created, or participated in creating, the Kelihos malware.”
Kelihos, a network of compromised machines, used to send over 3.8 million spam emails a day at its peak, and Microsoft alleges that Sabelnikov used malware to control and operate the botnet,…
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Twitters Botnet Controller
Author: William Miller
This seems to be big news lately but it doesn’t surprise me much. Someone that I follow on Twitter actually commented in February that they were seeing patterns like this. See http://twitter.com/ron_mills/status/1189418872
Unfortunately ron_mills didn’t reference what patterns he was seeing but he called it.
Now lets see if BotTrax is on the money too with the account takeover scenario. http://www.bottrax.com/?p=51
Basically the botnet controller that was recently unveiled works by having infected computers monitor Twitter feeds to take specific actions based on the tweet. In the past instructions were generally sent through IRC, and a whole bunch of other methods. Lets just add Twitter to the list:
Obviously there are more but just think about it this way, any way you can communicate with a system can be used to issue commands remotely if the system is vulnerable.
[pcworld]
