Rent Your Own Botnet

Posted by Unknown on Tuesday September 6, 2011 @08:12AM from the wake-up-with-missing-kidney dept.

An anonymous reader writes "New research shows that the TDSS/TDL-4 botnet, widely considered one of the largest and most sophisticated, can be rented via a Web storefront available to all comers. Researchers from Kaspersky found that the latest version of TDSS installs a file that sets the machine up as a proxy for anonymous browsing, and then phones home to awmproxy.net, which rents the proxies for rates from $3 per day to $300 a week. The curators of this service even created a Firefox add-on to help customers. 'Interestingly, AWMproxy says it accepts payment via PayPal, MasterCard, and Visa.'"

1 of 79 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Re:Here's how it works. by Anonymous Coward · 2011-09-06 08:57 · Score: 3, Insightful

> when the payment processors get word of it, they will cut off business.
Huh? Call up a credit card company and tell them they are allowing people to rent botnets by using said credit card. They will have no idea wtf you are talking about, and they certainly wouldn't care. It will take courts/governments to get them to stop accepting the charges for these services. And even then it its a one-off thing. Credit card companies don't have a toggle button that turns off CC payments that go to botnet managers.
I agree that something may eventually get done about it, but this 'oh the cc companies will figure out ALL about this and the problem will go away shortly' is naive.