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 ...

Music Unleashes the Malware Beast

Monday, May 12th, 2008

This definitely won’t be music to the ears of music aficionados who acquire their MP3s from peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, but it’s definitely not something they haven’t heard of either. A host of adware under the guise of media files on P2P networks have been reportedly raking up numbers of victims on ...

A Case Study on Storm Worm

Friday, April 18th, 2008

A bot is a computer program installed on a compromised machine which offers an attacker a remote control mechanism. Botnets, i.e., networks of such bots under a common control infrastructure, pose a severe threat to today’s Internet: Botnets are commonly used for Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks, sending of spam, or ...

Clean and Infected File Sharing Programs

Saturday, March 8th, 2008

Wondering if your favorite peer-to-peer file-swapping program has spyware bundled into it? Chances are good that it does. The information on this page is believed to be accurate. However, if any program is listed under the wrong section, please let me know immediately. If you know of a file sharing ...

Media Files that Spread Spyware

Saturday, March 8th, 2008

Users have a lot to worry about when downloading and playing media files. Are the files legal? Can their computers play the required file formats? Now there's yet another problem to add to the list: Will a media file try to install spyware? When Windows Media Player encounters a file ...

Beastie Boys CD installs virus

Saturday, March 8th, 2008

According to unconfirmed reports, including a recent thread on the BugTraq mailing list, versions of a new Beastie Boys CD from Capitol Records ('To the Five Boroughs'), which is being distributed worldwide except in the USA and UK, contain what could be labeled as a computer virus. Based on these ...

VX2.betterinternet and Bundleware Infestations on the Rise

Saturday, March 8th, 2008

"Over the past month, I have seen an increase in infestations by a group called Bundleware.com which with the signature of Ad-aware calling it VX2.BetterInternet objects. Until last night, I believed it was wrong to label Bundelware with the VX2 Transponder signature as their methods were different from what I ...