Microsoft Office Security Team Enlists Bots, Pen Tests

Thursday, July 17th, 2008

Storm, Srizbi, and... Microsoft? Microsoft’s Office application security team actually runs its own internal botnet, which, among other things, “fuzzes” for vulnerabilities in Office applications. Microsoft’s botnet isn’t anywhere near the size of Srizbi (over 300,000 bots at last count) nor any of the other mega-botnets -- it’s just a couple ...

Teenager confesses to being Nugache botnet mastermind

Tuesday, July 1st, 2008

Experts at SophosLabs™, Sophos's global network of virus, spyware and spam analysis centers, have welcomed news that a teenager has confessed to controlling thousands of computers in an illegal botnet.19-year-old Jason Michael Milmont, of Cheyenne, Wyoming, has admitted to being the programmer of the Nugache malware which infected Windows computers, ...

Hacker Launches Botnet Attack via P2P Software

Sunday, June 29th, 2008

A 19-year-old hacker is agreeing to plead guilty to masterminding a botnet to obtain thousands of victims' personal data in an anonymous scheme a federal cybercrime official described Friday as the nation's first such attack in which peer-to-peer software was the "infection point."The defendant, Jason Michael Milmont, launched the assault ...

Two million password stealers fingered

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

Microsoft's Malicious Software Removal Tool - a program that removes malware from Windows machines - detected password-stealing software from more than 2 million PCs in the first week after it was updated. One password stealer, called Taterf, alone was detected on 700,000 computers in the first day after the update. That's ...

A quarter of US PCs infected with malware

Monday, June 2nd, 2008

An OECD study into online crime says that increased activity by cyber criminals has left an estimated one-in-four US computers infected with malware. The report, entitled Malicious Software (malware): a Security Threat to the Internet Economy, gives an impression of two worlds engaged in an uneven war of virus invasion and ...