Recently … our TDL tracker picked up a brand new plugin for TDL4 kad.dll (Win32/Olmarik.AVA) which we haven’t seen earlier … we discovered that it implements a particularly interesting network communication protocol …

The Lookout Mobile Security company is reporting a new trojan horse program that runs on Android based phones. The novel thing about this trojan is that it has enough functionality to allow the criminals to assemble an Android based botnet. This really should come as no surprise. The Android is not a phone with web

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

  Comcast has announced that they are trialing a new service that alerts users when their computers are infected. You can read about it here: http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-10370996-245.html. Essentially what happens is that when Comcast notices traffic that looks like bot related traffic they will pop up a message on the subscriber’s computer that indicates there is

ESET released its Global Threat Report for the month of September, 2009, identifying the top ten threats seen during the month by ESET's ThreatSense.Net™ cloud.  You can view the report here and, as always, the complete collection is available here in the Threat Trends section of our web site.  While the report identifies a number

Australia’s Internet Industry Association (IIA) is working on best practices for isolating computers with bots on them (http://iia.net.au/index.php/initiatives/isps-guide.html) At the same time, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is also drafting a document about the same thing (http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-oreirdan-mody-bot-remediation-03) If these recommendations are adopted then people who have bots on their computers would have to get

News came out today that Michael Jackson’s death has been ruled as a homicide. Expect to see spam and hoax emails coming around soon trying to exploit this news. It seems that Michael Jackson just can’t die. It’s a good thing we didn’t have the internet when Elvis died. If you get emails for pictures,

Some more information on the Hexzone botnet has come my way, mostly from FireEye’s Atif Mushtaq and Paul Ferguson’s hairdresser (don’t ask!). Atif also mentions the association with ransomware: the malware is installed as a Browser Helper Object (BHO) on the victim’s machine, and hijacks browsing sessions, taking the victim to a page hosting pornography.

If you just got here looking for my blog on Conficker and "blended hoaxes", I’m afraid I just pulled it (temporarily at least) in the light of new data that’s come in since last night: I don’t want to mislead anyone, as it seems that the new Conficker stuff is a lot more active and

If it was the intention of the Conficker gang to create a huge splash, they succeeded. (In fact, it’s quite possible that they’ve attracted more attention than they really wanted.) In any case, it seems that lots of people are looking nervously over their shoulders for any indication that something unpleasant and Conficker-related is about