Researchers at the International Computer Science Institute and UC-San Diego have achieved 100 per cent success rates in filtering spam from a specific botnet. The strategy? Capture the enemy, and make him talk.
If you’re envisioning lines of code flying across bays of screens, amphetamine-fuelled digital manhunts and dramatic, albeit rendered, explosions, I’m sorry. When major botnets fall nowadays, it’s the product of hard work, patience and some well-placed phone calls.
Well, this is equal parts frightening and annoying: Malware writers and their lot have been buying up data centres and getting approved for large blocks of IP space. What’s that mean? That they can pretty much run rampant.
On the surface, April 1 came and went without a peep from the dreaded Conficker megaworm. But security experts see a frightening reality, one where Conficker is now more powerful and more dangerous than ever.
When the Dutch High Tech Crime unit raided the 150,000-machine strong Shadow botnet, they didn’t simply bust its 19- and 16-year-old basement-dwelling operators. Oh no. Instead of simply decapitating it from the top, the police enlisted the help of Kaspersky Labs to actually take full control, driving the cold dagger of the law even deeper into Shadow’s own soulless guts.
The Storm Worm Botnet currently infects between one and ten million computers worldwide, which means that it has access to a huge amount of processing power and somewhere between 1 and 10 petabytes of RAM. This apparently makes it one of the most powerful computers in the world, with more computing power than the ten fastest supercomputers in the world combined.
