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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!
"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.
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?
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.
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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
- 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.
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.