botnet

23 Articles

Company Shutdown Causes 2/3rds Drop In All Spam

November 12, 2008 by 26 Comments

The Washington Post is reporting that the shutdown of one hosting company has caused the total volume of spam to drop by 2/3rds. The company in question is McColo Corp. Both Hurricane Electric and Global Crossing pulled the plug today after a damning report revealed a number of illegal activities happening on McColo’s servers. McColo already had a reputation with the security community. When contacted about abuse, the company would often shift servers to new IP ranges instead of shutting them down. Although not the main source of spam, the company was host to many botnet control servers and phishing sites.

[photo: mattdork]

[via Waxy]

Botnet Attack Via P2P Software

June 29, 2008 by 7 Comments


P2P networks have long been a legal gray area, used for various spam schemes, illegal filesharing, and lots and lots of adware. Last year, though, the first botnet created by a worm distributed via P2P software surfaced, the work of 19-year-old [Jason Michael Milmont] of Cheyenne, Wyoming, who distributed his Nugache Worm by offering free downloads of the P2P app Limewire with the worm embedded. He later began distributing it using bogus MySpace and Photobucket links shared via chats on AOL Instant Messenger. The strategy proved effective, as the botnet peaked with around 15,000 bots. [Milmont] has plead guilty to the charges against him. Per his plea agreement, he will pay $73,000 in restitution and may serve up to five years in prison.