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Mega-D Botnet Overtakes Storm, Accounts for 32% of Spam
Stony Stevenson writes "The new Mega-D Botnet has overtaken the notorious Storm worm botnet as the largest single source of the world's spam according to security vendor Marshal. This botnet currently accounts for 32 percent of all spam, 11 percent more than the Storm botnet which peaked at 21 percent in September 2007. It started about 4 months ago but has been steadily increasing since then. It is also using news headlines to trick victims into opening the spam, a technique synonymous with the Storm worm."
It must work - I clicked on this article ...
...if they were to work together against a common enemy!
Ah well, there's always hope. BAHA-HAHAHAHAHAAAH
"Mega-D botnet"? Pffft! That's nothing compared to the latest ship-and-anchor technology!
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
So what's the end goal? A botnet that accounts for 99.9% of all spam? Not that that would necessarily be all bad; at least then we'd be able to unite our ire against one entity.
Largest multiple source, I'd say. It's a bot net after all.
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
If this new guy uses a technique which something else used, the technique is no longer synonymous with either of them.
For those of us still running Windows XP, I remember there being several products from Mcafee and Symantec that would be available for free download to remove the latest pieces of malware. I don't know what the latest and greatest is now. Are there any specific tools we can use (beyond a virus scanner) to check for and removed malware?
Now, if they would just make the punishment castration for creating these botnets, spam would grind to a halt.
You see a lot of this stuff coming out of the Middle East: Jews did 911, Jews own the USA, Jews will make your penis shrink, etc etc
We need to fight back!
"The Jewish people have never had a friend in both fair and foul weather. Our allies have betrayed us, deserted us in our hour of need, and killed us in unprecedented numbers using crematoria and poison gas. To be Jewish is to know that wherever you go, you'll always have to watch your back.
Even in Israel we are persecuted by another ethnic group, the Arabs, who will not be happy until the last Jew is dead. In Europe, Nationalism is rising in Germany, Russia, France and the Netherlands. Soon there will be no tolerance left for Jews, and we will be exterminated.
Unless we take a stand."
http://www.zionists.com/
Anti-Globalism
The Mega-DD botnet is on the way! For real men!
Isn't is nice to see that governments rather go after internet gambling, something that really doesn't dother me at all, and completely ignore spam, something that is really annoying to us, the normal people...
It makes clear, once again, that governments are totally not 2.0-ready. They don't know about how technologies work and how to deal with it.
Privacy is terrorism.
In a world full of people looking to get what they want at the expense of all others, we should learn to accept that the bigger fish will eat the smaller fish, but even the smaller fish gotta eat.
People drive their cars every day... there are accidents sometimes. The accidents slow the traffic and pisses everyone off. Sometimes accidents are actually the fault of stupid people. Sometimes the accidents are design problems in the cars. Sometimes the accidents are problems with the roads themselves. But when the accident is cleared and people are going their merry way, we forget the accidents and we certainly never give the causes another thought.
Sometimes people do things to help make the roads safer, but what really works is education and improving levels of awareness. Where driving is concerned, at least where I live, we're at a pretty good balance... not too many accidents and awareness is high enough that it stays that way. Because when it comes to travel on the roads, we know there are no safe roads and there are no safe cars. There are only safe drivers.
I'm trying to draw pictures to draw comparisons. The comparisons should be rather obvious if I haven't been modded -2 Off-topic already. I'm trying to show the motives and the mentality leading to how we got where we are... we have stupid people without awareness or education. We have unsafe computers and unsafe networks. The network needs to be safer, but it can only be "so safe" without removing too much of its usability. The computers need to be safer and certainly CAN be safer... just like cars, the makers need to be sued and regulated until they ARE safer. (Yes, that means Microsoft should be held accountable for their part of the blame!) But computers can only be made "so safe" without removing too much of its usability. After that, the rest of the balance can only be maintained with education and awareness and that's the job of the governing bodies.
We live in a world with a lot of problems and dangers. We teach about a lot of things and think it's rather natural that those things we don't teach and warn people about will naturally lead to problems related to it. We've got a culture and economic system that *VERY* dependent on the public internet and the use of personal computers. We've got heavy dependence on a very weak and exploitable system. I just have to wonder how bad it has to get before the enablers are finally held responsible.
The enablers are the designers of the internet, Microsoft and the governments. The internet is being fixed with IPv6 but not fast enough because the governments are in the pockets of the people who stand to make less profit while the transitions are being made from IPv4 to IPv6. Microsoft is a significant inhibitor (among others) of change and improvement because they are the dominant technology connecting the public internet to the users and to the resources and economy that they all mutually depend on. Government is the only way to make change happen because it is clear that the wisdom and intelligence of the public is low enough that they will always be ineffective. Microsoft and other industry players spend and pay so that they can remain unregulated. They are the enablers of the hell we live with. Let's thank them. Thank the enablers.
It is the government's responsibility to educate the people absolutely and they are failing in that responsibility absolutely. (Note that I don't say it is the government's responsibility to protect the people. Government needs only to provide for common defense and to promote general welfare.) It is also the government's responsibility to regulate things that can cause problems or interference with the general welfare which includes the economy. The public internet, anything dependent on the internet, and the economy are demonstrably threatened by unregulated majority and monopoly players such as Microsoft. They don't want to be regulated, but they need to be regulated as the general welfare is at risk.
A si
Or, they could develop a much more robust variant, called the Tenacious-D!
Chasing after security vulnerabilities and hackers is ridiculous. There wouldnt be spam-botnets if you hit the people paying the hackers. Killing a bot or imprisoning a hacker causes a tiny blip. If we charged every company being advertised in the spam the problem would go away. Spam wouldnt be profitable anymore.
I don't quite get the spam thing anymore. It's solved. Spam is not annoying any more. Just use one of the big free email providers and you get relatively little spam. Even most corporations do a reasonable job with 3rd party spam filters. Sure, you still get it, but it's not annoying if it's a trickle.
Don't want to use a web interface? No problem, just get the free email service to fetch your mail, then download your filtered email by POP or IMAP. Okay, there's only one provider I know that lets you do that for free, but it probably has the best spam filtering too.
So you say all this spam is clogging up bandwidth? Well I bet it's still nothing compared with the bandwidth consumed by file sharing and video web sites. The economics of spam is changing, with fewer results per email sent, and more jail time per email sent, I reckon you'd have to be nuts to be a spammer these days.
Phishing on the other hand.. now that's bad.
In the case of a large botnet, instead of each security company trying to compete for user downloads (e.g. Symantec, AVG, Kapersky, Microsoft OneCare, etc) they should all get together, make one free download that specifically targets and eradicates the botnet source on the computer (on any OS) and ensure it gets shoved through all the distrubution channels like Microsoft download, Linux package installers, other tool updates, etc. Maybe the botnet is too complicated for this. I don't know the detials. However I know it's within the software companies' reaches to work together in spcial situations.
How much of this is just botnets fighting over the same zombies -- how many existing old botnet zombies get taken over by the new botnet?
Heck, how many actual botnet masters are there? Is this just the same people but with new malware? Is this malware just version n + 1 of the old malware? Or do the same botnet masters have several botnets?
I sure don't know much about these in this kind of sense.
Infuriate left and right
Release a botnet that becomes self aware. Such that, it takes over 100% of all spam production, plus a large fraction of the emails sent by a genuine sentience.
- they must have security updates turned off, because they might break the computer? (This is where your proposal falls down)
- they don't need virus protection, because they have a fire wall
- they can't use passwords, because "what if someone else needed to get on"
- they are perpetually in an administrator account, because right clicking executable & selecting "run as" is WAY to inconvenient
- they are using internet explorer, because their favourite website only works if they allow the world to run unsigned activeX controls
- they are using outlook, because learning how to use any other calendar & task list is IMPOSSIBLY EXPENSIVE. Think of the down time
- their computer takes 30mins to boot up
- their internet connection is slow
- they have regular IT outages costing them WHAT?
- the government & their ISP should do something about these damn spammers
- they didn't have a virus before they spoke to you
- all of the above
Solutions exist. The problem is all the wrong kinds of 'education'thx e
If spam went away, everyone except for the largest email providers could run their MTAs on old surplus pentium 100s...and mail would flow very quickly.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Very good point. Most people I know don't run Windows update, many because their Windows isn't "Genuine" and would likely be disabled. This also leaves my original suggestion in a bind. If Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT) could be pushed through means other than the Windows update process then more people might receive it and be vaccinated.
Maybe another company should run an update service for only "critical" situations to push these tools to users without sharing information with Microsoft, assuring users they and their OS are guarded from Microsoft intervention. Just make sure it's in the right hands. If those hands were trusted by Microsoft then it could be built into the Windows OS (unlikely).
The deal was handled by his associate, the convicted crook, who was the mastermind behind the Herbalife spam. It made me think...
Spam is responsible for the largest part of the Internet traffic. It should make the spammers most influential people.
They are rich, they have an access to all private information on our computers, they can bring down an infrastructure of any country, they can promote any idea.
Could it be that spammers are taking over the world? That they are behind the nowadays PMs and presidents? Can put and take them off at will?
This theory explains it all. The volume of spam, the spread of bot-nets, the Tony Blair case, the constant growths of spam.
A lot of people spent a lot of time & money preventing anything really bad from happening. It mostly worked. You don't hear "those IT guys were great about keeping everything from shutting down." Nope, what you hear is "What about all the doom & gloom? Nothing happened!" Well, of course not. We patched everything *before* it broke.
jred
I'm not a mechanic but I play one in my garage...
buy idiomatik dick cream and add 3 inches overnight!
Just wonder, who is actually regulating whom.. Seems to me, that big companies have more to say, than government, especially in the new technology parts. Not that it matters, the same evolutionary system still works, that brought us here in the last few million years, and it says: until the people don't get really annoyed and bothered, so they actually stop the all day life and say "wait a minute, can't we do anything about it?", the destructive forces grow further. But if I see the right way of history (hopefully not), than the majority will never care, the destructive forces will rip apart the whole system (viral behavior) until the point, where eMail won't be a viable option, and some new communication will follow. Maybe I should buy a pigeon..
Actually I think a better solution would be to set up bounties and send out teams with
Try this:
HOW TO SECURE Windows 2000/XP/Server 2003 & VISTA + make it "fun" to do & quantifiable via CIS Tool:
http://forums.pcpitstop.com/index.php?s=fa2b98dd98aa1a4bfe35daeafd757c40&showtopic=150310
The tools/tips/tricks/techniques it points out aren't ONLY applicable to Microsoft Windows NT-based OS' of today (like 2000/XP/Server 2003 & even VISTA) either, since they also to Linux variants, BSD variants, Solaris & others as well (if only @ times via principals used on the "others").
Using CIS Tool for your "benchmark/gauge" also helps quantify ANY progress made (based on "best practices" for security on each platform the testing tool runs on)... &, it works.
APK
P.S.=> I have a friend (a security guard/PI by trade) who applied its points & used the CIS Tool to take his system from a 46.xxx score, out to a 90.xxx score using CIS Tool's guidance + that posts' other points layered ontop of those from CIS Tool, & instead of turning up his "usual" 200-300 infestations a month? He has only turned up 1 since in the past 6 months or so now, & only because he turned on JavaScript + Frames in his browser & hauled in a trojan (which we killed using the points in that thread no less which are listed with 100% free tools to remove most ANY online infector/infestor there is, nearly EVERY time, IF you 'disobey' some of that posts' points on how to never get them anymore)... apkl
Install a brain on those users.
:-/
Seriously, the problem is awareness. Of course the user could decrease his/her chance of being infected if he/she adopts good security practices, but the fact that users are not is exactly the problem. The GP's point is that Microsoft is in a position to shove anti-trojan programs (if even specifically targeted at a few versions of popular botnet trojans) into all its users' throats, and thus instantly relieving some of the spam problems.
But why am I replying to a slashvertisement anonymous troll anyway
"nstall a brain on those users. Seriously, the problem is awareness." - by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 03, @11:54AM (#22282804) Exactly - which is what that URL in my first reply, is all about...
:-/" - by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 03, @11:54AM (#22282804) Well, I can say that same in - "Why am I replying to another 'A/C' here?"
"Of course the user could decrease his/her chance of being infected if he/she adopts good security practices" - by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 03, @11:54AM (#22282804) Absolutely they can, & the evidences noted not only by myself above in my pal's successes using it, but also those from forums w/in the URL itself, clearly evidence your statement, for me...
"but the fact that users are not is exactly the problem. The GP's point is that Microsoft is in a position to shove anti-trojan programs (if even specifically targeted at a few versions of popular botnet trojans) into all its users' throats, and thus instantly relieving some of the spam problems." - by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 03, @11:54AM (#22282804) Exactly - placebos. "There is more money in temp. fixes, than there is in the cure - keep people 'sick', & give them a palliative, instead of an outright cure or preventative"... & 1 oz. of PREVENTION > 1,000's of "CURE".
APK
P.S.=> "But why am I replying to a slashvertisement anonymous troll anyway
Man - Labels?? They're stupid... & overly "generalizing"... apk
The real problem here is identifying the problems before they even start, which is in essence, pretty impossible to do with our current technology, and could even violate some legitimate rights. As far as I'm concerned, currently, it's pretty easy to spot a scam/bot-net spam as it is. Usually they'll come out with the e-mails/spam stating... "You have xxx time to reply!" ", this is your final notice!" ", get your prescription Xanax at discounted cost!" "You have $800,000 in cash to claim! Click HERE!" The other way to spot these spam messages as a scam is to look at the wording. Generally, a scammer/bot-spam will make spelling mistakes, make websites that are similar but EXACT to legitimate ones, and ask you for your social-security number or bank account information. You should NEVER EVER click, or reply to these e-mails. What scares me is when these bot-nets are designed to draw user-specific information from the person/s they are being sent to. Lets say you have a bank account as bank. If a bot-net were ever able to actually find this information, then pose a scam or e-mail closely mimic something that ACTUALLY applies to you as a person, and has relevancy to your current everyday life... then that might be something to be feared. I guess the major points of this would be to just protect yourself from these scams/botnet: 1. Use you're common sense. If you have no idea what it's about, then it's likely not legit. 2. Look for spelling errors in e-mails and messages. Legitimate cooperations usually hire literate people these does, and spell check is a COMMONLY used tool. 3. Don't be an idiot... Get Spyware, Firewall, and Antivirus protection. If you don't know how, consult some IT Specialists... or the plethora of geeks that surf Slashdot. Cheers.
And how about Joe Jobs? Companies would try to kill each other by doing Joe Jobs.