McColo Briefly Returns, Hands Off Botnet Control

A week ago we discussed the takedown of McColo (and the morality of that action). McColo was reportedly the source of anywhere from 50% to 75% of the world's spam. On Saturday the malware network briefly returned to life in order to hand over command and control channels to a Russian network. "The rogue network provider regained connectivity for about 12 hours on Saturday by making use of a backup arrangement it had with Swedish internet service provider TeliaSonera. During that time, McColo was observed pushing as much as 15MB of data per second to servers located in Russia, according to ... Trend Micro. The brief resurrection allowed miscreants who rely on McColo to update a portion of the massive botnets they use to push spam and malware. Researchers from FireEye saw PCs infected by the Rustock botnet being updated so they'd report to a new server located at abilena.podolsk-mo.ru for instructions. That means the sharp drop in spam levels reported immediately after McColo's demise isn't likely to last."

Comments

Re:Epic Fail.

[girlintraining]

In this highly hypothetical situation, I'd go to the local TV station with my recording(s) and a statement from the police indicating their lack of interest.

And "to continue the analogy" if that doesn't work I'll just transform into Optimus Prime and destroy anyone who keeps on about hypothetical situations instead of using common sense.

Re:How to stop internet crime

[the_womble]

Ancient Athens was a direct democracy as well, and a society that contributed a huge amount culturally. Although they did not give women the vote - or slaves, or people of foreign ancestry.

I rather like the idea of picking people for public office by lot. It eliminates the selection bias towards self-important interfering busy-bodies.