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Spammers sought after botnet takedown

The Rustock botnet, which sent up to 30 billion spam messages per day, might have been run by two or three people.

Early analysis, following raids to knock out the spam network, suggest that it was the work of a small team.

Rustock was made up of about one million hijacked PCs and employed a series of tricks to hide itself from scrutiny for years.

Since the raids on the network's hardware, global spam levels have dropped and remain relatively low.

Net gains

"It does not look like there were more than a couple of people running it to me," said Alex Lanstein, a senior engineer at security firm FireEye, which helped with the investigation into Rustock.

Mr Lanstein based his appraisal on familiarity with Rustock gained whil

He said that the character of the code inside the Rustock malware and the way the giant network was run suggested that it was operated by a small team.

That work by FireEye, Microsoft, Pfizer and others culminated on 16 March with simultaneous raids on data centres in seven US cities that seized 96 servers which had acted as the command and control (C&C) system for Rustock. More...

03-27-2011 18:30

Add-On Gives Power and Nuance to ‘Do Not Track’

Just a year ago, the discussion about whether websites could be prevented from tracking visitors was an arcane topic limited to hard-core privacy activists — and dismissed by many as fundamentally impossible: The equivalent of the Do Not Call list, the naysayers argued, would technically lead to more tracking.

But now Do Not Track has evolved into something simpler — a signal sent by your browser to a website. The technology is included in Monday’s release of the most widely used browser in the world – Internet Explorer — and will be in next week’s expected release of Firefox 4.

Microsoft went even further, including a tool that lets you import lists of tracking sites you want to block entirely so that you don’t have to rely, as Do Not Track does, on the goodwill of a website to comply with your wishes. More...

03-16-2011 17:11

Cyber attacks could create "perfect storm" - OECD

(Reuters) - Attacks on computer systems now have the potential to cause global catastrophe, but only in combination with another disaster, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said in a report on Monday.

The study, part of a wider OECD project examining possible "Future Global Shocks" such as a failure of the world's financial system or a large-scale pandemic, said there were very few single "cyber events" that could cause a global shock.

Examples were a successful attack on one of the technical protocols on which the Internet depends, or a large solar flare that wiped out key communications components such as satellites.

But it said a combination of events such as coordinated cyber attacks, or a cyber incident occurring during another form of disaster, should be a serious concern for policy makers.

"In that eventuality, 'perfect storm' conditions could exist," said the report, written by Professor Peter Sommer of the London School of Economics and Dr Ian Brown of Britain's Oxford University. More...

01-17-2011 19:48

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