The US Department of Justice's announcement yesterday of the takedown of the command and  control (C&C) servers for the Coreflood bots (detected by ESET as Win32/AFCore) and seizure of their domains marks another step in the growing awareness that crime, whether it is committed with bullets or with botnets, is still crime.  This particular botnet,

Here’s a little information from ESET’s point of view about the Coreflood botnet, whose C&C (Command and Control) servers were taken down yesterday by the Department of Justice. The Coreflood bot is detected by ESET products as Win32/Afcore and has been active since the early years of the last decade (certainly since 2001), though our

Win32/Olmarik (also known as TDSS, TDL, Alureon and sundry less complimentary names) has gone through some interesting evolutions in the last couple of years. TDL4 is no exception, with its ability to load its kernel-mode driver on systems with an enforced kernel-mode code signing policy (64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows Vista and 7) and perform

The BBC program Panorama last night investigated claims that the News of the World hired a hacker to break into a subject's PC to steal emails. In fact, it appears that the unnamed hacker installed a Trojan on the victim's PC. Which sounds like a fairly unequivocal breach of the Computer Misuse Act, which outlaws

…This paper, presented at the Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (2010) … discusses alternative approaches to understanding botnet mechanisms, using “in the lab” experiments involving at-scale emulated botnets…

The paper presents an alternative approach to botnet research, employing “in the lab” experiments involving at-scale emulated botnets.

This weekend, an unnamed worm forced Microsoft to temporarily suspend active links  in Live Messenger 2009, in order to prevent the aggressive worm from spreading further. This is quite a surprising measure, because worms spreading through Instant Messaging (IM) such as Skype, Yahoo! Messenger and Microsoft Live Messenger are not new at all! For example,

Bart Parys (@bartblaze) recently contacted me about research he was conducting into botnets, exploit kits and so on. His article "The Botnet Wars: a Q&A" is now up. While Bart himself is a Technical Support Engineer at Panda Security, he's taken the approach of asking a number of experts and commentators (I'll leave it to

The attacks from cybercriminals are now occurring in the online stock and equity trading world. Instead of simply emptying out compromised brokerage accounts, cybercriminals apparently are refining their attacks and striking at broader and more lofty goals: the trust mechanisms of business equity valuations with publicly traded stocks and equities. George Hulme, InformationWeek contributing writer

Since the feed will be public and historic, there is a potential to research trends over the timeline, particularly as twitter is being used for more command and control functionality. As soon as it becomes available, we’ll follow up. :)