botnet

Pierluigi Paganini May 02, 2013
ESET on Avatar rootkit with API, SDK, and Yahoo Groups as C&C

ESET security firm found a mysterious instance of Avatar rootkit with API, SDK, and Yahoo Groups for C&C communication Early this year ESET security firm detected the Avatar rootkit (Win32/Rootkit.Avatar), a mysterious malware advertised  as rootkit by Russian cybercrime on specific forums. “We present you here previously announced product. In connection with work on other projects, […]

Pierluigi Paganini April 27, 2013
FireEye report on advanced cyber attacks landscape

FireEye report on the evolution of sophisticated cyber threats and their diffusion on global scale FireEye security firm has published another interesting report, titled “FireEye report -The Advanced Cyber Attack Landscape”, that provides an overview of advanced cyber attack landscape, these events are a widespread global activity and during 2012.   FireEye experts detected  12 million malware communications seeking instructions, […]

Pierluigi Paganini April 23, 2013
New wave of DDoS against EU Banking can hide a sinister mystery

In the last months of 2012 a group of hackers known as “Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters” conducted a series of attacks against principal banking and financial institutions including the U.S. Bancorp, JPMorgan Chase&co, Bank of America, PNC Financial Fervices Group, and SunTrust Banks. Security experts noted that the hackers adopted an anomalous strategy for the […]

Pierluigi Paganini April 22, 2013
HTTP-Botnets: The Dark Side of a Standard Protocol!

When the HTTP protocol was born in 1999, no one ever thought it will be used by one of the most dangerous Cyber threats called Botnet. A bot is an application that can perform and repeat a particular task faster than a human. When a large number of bots infect different targets (e.g. Computers and […]

Pierluigi Paganini April 19, 2013
New dangerous threat Magic Malware hit thousands of UK firms

The Internet is full of news regarding malware more or less sophisticated that are used for various purposes, cybercrime, cyber espionage, hacktivism or cyber warfare but not all these agents demonstrated their efficiency over the time. This time thousands of UK companies have been targeted by a smart malware, dubbed “Magic Malware”,  that has gone undetected […]

Pierluigi Paganini April 15, 2013
Bitcoin in the storm and cybercrime try to take advantage of it

As can be imagined and anticipated the soar of Bicoin value has attracted the interest of cybercrime, recently we read of malware authors and botmasters that trying to exploit new and old channels to steal virtual currency or mine it using computational resources of the victims. Security experts from Kaspersky Lab found variant of malware spread via […]

Pierluigi Paganini April 14, 2013
WordPress sites under massive brute-force attack

Any owner of WordPress site is shaking causes of the threat that someone could steal its credentials, everybody would do well to ask themselves if their passwords are really strong and to make sure to don’t use as username the word “admin.” The reports published by CloudFlare and HostGator revealed a massive attack being launched against WordPress blogs […]

Pierluigi Paganini April 10, 2013
How cybercrime uses a compromised Skype account

In various articles I wrote on the large diffusion of botnets and the capabilities of malicious agents to use as spread channel the social media platforms or popular applications. The diffusion and management of a botnet architecture has never been so easy, the underground offer covers every need and provides advanced customization services. Security expert […]

Pierluigi Paganini April 09, 2013
Wandering in the underground, from exploit kits to hacking services

The cybercrime industry knows no crisis, new services are offered in the underground and criminals operating in different sectors are increasing their interest in the possibility to adopt cyber tools to organize prolific scam and fraud. Underground offers everything necessary to commit a cyber crime, from tools for hacking services and in many cases all is […]

Pierluigi Paganini March 31, 2013
Botnet authors use Evernote account as C&C Server

Botnet author are increasing complexity of the malicious code they use and at the same time security firms are adopting more sophisticated detection methods. Between principal concerns of botmaster the need to improve the capabilities of bot agents to operate silently and necessity to masquerade traffic from bots and Command & Control servers. Focusing on this […]