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Top Botnets Control Some 1 Million Hijacked Computers
Puskas writes "Joe Stewart is the director of malware research at SecureWorks, and presented a dire view of the current botnet landscape at the RSA conference this week. He conducted a survey of the top spamming 'nets, extrapolating their size from the volume of emails that flow across the internet. By his calculations, the top 11 networks control just over a million machines, hitting inboxes with some 100 billion messages a day. 'The botnet at the top of the chart is Srizbi. According to Stewart, this botnet — which also goes by the names "Cbeplay" and "Exchanger" — has an estimated 315,000 bots and can blast out 60 billion messages a day.
While it may not have gotten the publicity that Storm has during the last year, it's built around a much more substantial collection of hijacked computers, said Stewart. In comparison, Storm's botnet counts just 85,000 machines, only 35,000 of which are set up to send spam. Storm, in fact, is No. 5 on Stewart's list.'"
Start with "microsoft" and "windows" as the technologies which bring you the largest, most profitable botnets!
you had me at #!
I'm a smart software developer, so I'm pretty sure my computer is not affected (secured hardware firewall, etc). But how can I be sure?
I don't necessarily trust that a clean-virus scan means a whole lot.
What's the best way to make this determination?
They obviously don't have a problem with tracking down and monitoring people. And they apperantly have bandwidth issue. Why don't they basically mail merge to SELECT * FROM `customers` WHERE `customers`.isinfected? Simple, cheap snail mail... nothing fancy.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
God knows I installed on that notebook each and every Anti-Spyware, Antivirus, Anti-everything in order to get rid of it. I traveled each and every "advisory" site with my HijackThis logs, removed numerous keys from registry. Still, every now and then goddamn popup window with site "pc-on-internet.com" appears. I spent altogether perhaps 3 working days trying to remove stupid thing, there is lot of data and SW installed so I am trying to avoid re-installation. Now I am in sitting-in-the-corner-and-crying phase.
839*929
Be that as it may, "Kraken" is a superb name (as is "Damballa" itself.). "Bobic", "Oderoor" and "Bobax" sound like open-source CMSs. "Cotmonger" sounds like a word Bart Simpson would use when suddenly breaking into a unfunny Cockney accent for no reason.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I had a botnet once... didn't catch very many bots, but I got a shitload of dolphins :(
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Please fwd me some spam selling whatever it is you're smoking.
If Windows weren't so dominant an OS then botnets would operate on other systems as well (or in its place). It's a question of ROI, nothing else.
That said, it's also not a question of an "offending operating system." It's a question of uninformed (or incompetent, or both) users. If they can't be trusted to not double-click on an xxxxx.jpg.exe file in an email, they are likely to have problems with identity theft and other non-Windows-exclusive security issues. Rather than taking away Windows, these users need to receive training in basic computer security.
Using Windows is NOT a privilege, by the way. If the user paid for it, they have a right to use it.
Cutting off internet and then asking for demonstration that... they've bought a Mac? Will this be demonstrated using ninja magic? A photo via mail?
I can't tell whether you're a Windows elitist, a Mac fanboy, or just plain mental.
I like basketball!!1!
The industry is going at this all wrong. There are only a few players left, and they're all crooks. We need a consortium of companies with spam problems to hire Kroll, Blackwater, or one of the other big international security companies to deal with the people behind the problem.
If 5% of the money spent on dealing with spam went into finding the people behind it and making them go away, the problem would go away.
Most infections actually patch and update machines they infect. Once they get in they seal the door behind them, as well as try to remove any competing infections already on the machine. That way they don't get their zombie stolen from them.
You never realize how much manually made unmanaged "linked" lists suck, till you have src.link.link.link.link...
Once you know the PC is compromised you cannot get it back to a known good state. The best you can hope for with the various utilities is to get it workable enough to offload your data, build your recovery media and record your settings. You're actually better off removing the hdd to an external enclosure and installing fresh on a new one. You could then scan the removable device before carefully recovering the data from it. The worst possible thing you could do is eliminate the visible problems and pretend that means you have a good PC on which to do work.
What is pwned cannot be unpwned. Reinstall. Somewhere in my journal may be some helpful instructions for getting the reinstall done without becoming compromised in the process. You're not the first (or the ten thosandth) person here this has happened to.
Somebody else here will have suggested you try Linux by now, or Apple. There are no Linux or Apple botnets so they don't have this problem. The do have security vulnerabilities too, but compromising one of them is a retail, rather than a wholesale, endeavor and so less fruitful for the botmasters.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Yes, they'll have other security-related problems, so I won't dispute that users are a huge part of the problem. BUT: Windows really is a special case. Give a clueless user another OS, and they will run malware or otherwise join botnets far less often, and not because of ROI or what platforms that malware authors choose to target. Outside of Windows, most naive users do not know how to even deliberately execute an email attachment. They wouldn't just have to click on xxxx.jpg.exe; they'd have to save it and chmod +x it first, since (AFAIK) no email clients go to extra trouble to help users execute malware.
Windows and its applications have an unusual amount of "support" for running malware. (Executable-by-default is just one feature; there's also autorun, ActiveX, and fuck-knows-what-else.) These are technical (not marketshare-related) "features" of the platform, which most other OS creators have not elected to implement. Windows would be attractive to malware authors even if it had a small marketshare, because the platform is malware-friendly.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Bull.
I have a legitimate right to send SMTP from my machine - and I do so. I also run an SMTP server at home - have since 1993, when I got off of uucp.
I have never been an open relay, and access is passwd. I already have assholes at AT&T blacklisting me for no reason - and suffering their ridiculous petition process to get off their RBL.
This is the Internet. A collection of networks. ISPs are not cops, nor should they be. When you mandate this on common carriers, they become something else - and any slim protections we still have remaining will be long gone.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
If it costs you $500 to rent a chunk of botnet bandwidth for a few days. It blasts 1,000,000 of your spam. 25,000 of them survive all the layers of filtering (2.5%) and are viewed. 1000 of those (4%) get their link clicked on. 100 of those people (10%) actually buy the product, netting you $15 each, for a total of $1,500 in untaxable income. That's $1,000 total profit for your 30 minutes of work.
So of that 1,000,000 spam you sent, only 100 had to be actually bought for you to turn a big buck. (1-100th of 1%)
Do the math, that's why it works. Spam works due to cheap volume. Anything works if you can have cheap volume.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.