Kelihos Relying On CBL Blacklists To Evaluate New Bots

Gunkerty Jeb writes "Kelihos, the peer-to-peer botnet with nine lives, keeps popping up with new capabilities that enable it to sustain itself and make money for its keepers by pushing spam, harvesting credentials and even stealing Bitcoins. According to a number of sources, Kelihos is now leveraging legitimate and freely available security services that manage composite blocking lists (CBLs) to determine if a potential victim's IP address has previously been flagged as a spam source or as a proxy."

Comments

Even bot-writers have to get modern eventually

[gweihir]

Real-time block lists have been the standard for blocking spam for quite a while. There is nothing new here, just some bot-net developers finally catching up.

I have to say I am ambivalent about this. On the one hand, it will taint a number of IP addresses (or whole subnets if the RBL provider is stupid, and some are). On the other hand, it will drive home the point that server security is non-optional, which is a good thing.