Stolen-data trove offers look inside a botnet

[Mousey]

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(AP)
Posted on Sun Mar 15, 2009 12:43PM EDT

SAN FRANCISCO - Getting hacked is like having your computer turn traitor on you, spying on everything you do and shipping your secrets to identity thieves.

Victims don't see where their stolen data end up. But sometimes security researchers do, stumbling across stolen-data troves that offer a glimpse of what identity theft looks like from criminals' perspective.

Researchers from U.K.-based security firm Prevx found one such trove, a Web site used as a stash house for data from 160,000 infected computers before it was shut down this month.

The find offers a case study on just how much data criminals are stealing every day, from the utterly inconsequential to the alarmingly private.

It also shows the difficulty in shuttering criminals' ...

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also in the article...

Some victims are gold mines for sensitive data. An infected computer at a Georgia bank exposed customer details and credentials for the bank's wire-transfer system. Bank employees were checking e-mail, looking up BMWs and Infinitis and working with customers' accounts on the same infected machine.

Government computers were also hit, including one in Texas that coughed up Web site logins for one of the government's health care providers, and another in North Carolina that revealed access to an agency's human resources system.

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I wanted to add that this illustrates very clearly the reason trojans/malware are more than just an irritation or aggravation which necessitate going thru the hassle of cleaning and sometimes reformatting our computers. They are a very real threat.

 

[Mousey]

Kraken the botnet: The ethics of counter-hacking

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Security Strategies Alert By M. E. Kabay , Network World , 03/17/2009

The Kraken (a 19th century word referring to a giant squid) is a huge network of personal computers that have been infected with software that turns them into zombie systems under the control of a master program - a botnet. The Kraken botnet is used by criminals to generate spam.

Kelly Jackson Higgins, writing for DarkReading, says, like Storm, Kraken so far is mostly being used for spamming the usual scams high interest loans, gambling, male enhancement products, pharmacy advertisements, and counterfeit watches, for instance. The botnet is the largest known; in April 2008 it was estimated to have included 400,000 zombies.

Gregg Keizer of Computerworld reports that in April 2008, TippingPoint researchers Pedram Amini and ....

 

[jas2587]

Oh Bloody Hell

Cindy