Big Botnet Busted

World's No. 3 spam botnet gasps dying breath after tense takedown

Security researchers said they dismantled the world's No. 3 spam botnet after convincing the companies that hosted its command and control servers to pull the plug on the operation.

Atif Mushtaq, senior staff scientist at security firm FireEye, said in a blog post that the botnet known as Grum drew its last dying breath on Wednesday, after six servers in Ukraine and one in Russia were shut down. In a tense faceoff with whitehats, the botnet operators had deployed those servers following the disconnection earlier this week of separate servers in the Netherlands and Panama. Faced with the threat of losing a 100,000-computer network that generated an estimated 18 billion spam messages a day, the Grum operators were desperately trying to transition to those machines when they stopped working.

"Grum's takedown resulted from the efforts of many individuals," Mushtaq wrote. "This collaboration is sending a strong message to all the spammers: 'Stop sending us spam. We don't need your cheap Viagra or fake Rolex. Do something else, work in a Subway or McDonalds, or sell hotdogs, but don't send us spam.'"

Responsible for about 18 percent of the world's junk messages, Grum was ranked as the No. 3 source of spam.

Good going guys.  Now get going after #2 and #1.  Spam is a plague and parasite on the internet and the economy.  Not to mention all the damage and theft carried out by the malware that they also put out.

So how does the value of spam support 100,000 computer network?

Squirrels Declare War on Advanced Civilization

Squirrels are the leading cause of data center crashes

Squirrels may be the data center's enemy number one. Level 3 Communications say that they accounted for an astounding 17 percent of all of their cable damage last year.

The thing is, squirrels are little chewing machines, and they love to chew right through whatever is in their way, even if it's a critical fiber-optic cable or (bad news for the squirrel) a live power line.

That's what happened to Yahoo a couple of years back, according to Mike Christian, a director of engineering at Yahoo. " A frying squirrel did take out half of our Santa Clara data center two years back," he said, speaking at the Velocity conference in Santa Clara, California last month.

Even worse, they're willing to die for the cause.

As Data Center Knowledge pointed out recently, squirrels account for an astoundingly large percentage of power outages.

Steven Hebert, a wildlife specialist with Swat Pest Control in San Jose, Calif. says that most of the time the culprit is the eastern grey tree squirrel. These guys don’t hibernate or burrow like their ground squirrel cousins.

How do you tell a ground squirrel from a tree squirrel? It's easy, Hebert says: "Clap your hands. If it runs up a tree, it's a tree squirrel."

We just had a power failure here, in fact, a series of short failures.  It seems to be back and stable now, but we're in the middle of a bunch of pop up thunderstorms so I'm glad I renewed the battery on my data saver so that it will hold my computer up long enough for a controlled shut down.

Even though it's probably the storms, I'll blame the crafty little squirrels for weakening the trees, or shorting the lines.

PSA: Having Flash Crashes?

If Adobe Flash Player is crashing on you (especially in Firefox), be aware that a recent update to Flash Player 11.3 is causing widespread problems.  Adobe has released a new version of Flash player that is supposed to fix it. 

Adobe fixes Flash Player for Firefox to stop crashes

I downgraded to 11.2 a couple days ago, and it's appears to have relieved the problem.I think I'll just wait for the next update now.

To test your flash player, play the following video (Courtesy of Theo's) repeatedly.  If it doesn't crash within ten plays, you're probably fine...

Feds: Cyber Criminals Hijacked 4 Million Computers

Cyber Criminal

An Eastern European pack of cyber thieves known as the Rove group hijacked at least four million computers in over 100 countries, including at least half a million computers in the U.S., to make off with $14 million in "illegitimate income" before they were caught, federal officials announced today.

The malware allegedly used in the "massive and sophisticated scheme" also managed to infect computers in U.S. government agencies including NASA and targeted the websites for major institutions like iTunes, Netflix and the IRS -- forcing users attempting to get to those sites to different websites entirely, according to a federal indictment unsealed in New York today.

The accused hackers, six Estonian nationals and a Russian national, rerouted the internet traffic illegally on the infected computers for the last four years in order to reap profits from internet advertisement deals, the indictment said. The FBI busted up the alleged international cyber ring after a two-year investigation called Operation Ghost Click.

"The global reach of these cyber thieves demonstrates that the criminal world is... flat," said Janice Fedarcyk, the FBI Assistant Director in charge of the New York field office. "The Internet is pervasive because it is such a useful tool, but it is a tool that can be exploited by those with bad intentions and a little know-how."

Though they operated out of their home countries, the alleged hackers used entities in the U.S. and all over the world -- including Estonia-based software company Rove Digital from which the group apparently gets its name -- to carry out the plot.

According to the indictment, the suspects entered into deals with various internet advertisers in which they would be paid for generating traffic to certain websites or advertisements. But instead of earning the money legitimately, the FBI said the defendants used malware to force infected computers to unwillingly visit the target sites or advertisements -- pumping up click results and, therefore, ill-gotten profits to the tune of $14 million.

The malware was also designed to prevent users from installing anti-virus software that may have been able to free the infected computers.

The six Estonian nationals have been arrested on cyber crime charges while the Russian national remains at large.

"Today, with the flip of a switch, the FBI and our partners dismantled the Rove criminal enterprise," Fedarcyk said. "Thanks to the collective effort across the U.S. and in Estonia, six leaders of the criminal enterprise have been arrested and numerous servers operated by the criminal organization have been disabled."

How the Fraud Worked, According to the FBI

The indictment describes several examples of alleged cyber fraud including two principle strategies: traffic redirection and ad replacement.

In the first case, if a user searched for the websites of major institutions like iTunes, Netflix or the IRS, the search results would return normally. However, if the user tried to click on the link to the websites, the malware on the computer would force a redirect to a different website where the criminals would profit in their advertisement deal.

In the second, when an infected computer visited a major website -- like Amazon.com -- the malware would be able to simply replace regular advertisements on that page with advertisements of their own making.

News by Yahoo

Read current news at http://bbc-cnn-worldnews.blogspot.com