Worm breeds botnet from home routers, modems

[Mousey]

You do not have permission to view link Log in or register now.

More than 100,000 hosts invaded

By Dan Goodin in San Francisco
Posted in Security, 24th March 2009 00:20 GMT


Security researchers have identified a sophisticated piece of malware that corrals consumer routers and DSL modems into a lethal botnet.

The "psyb0t" worm is believed to be the first piece of malware to target home networking gear, according to researchers from DroneBL, which bills itself as a real-time monitor of abusable internet addresses. It has already infiltrated an estimated 100,000 hosts. It has ...

 

[Mousey]

Wednesday March 25, 2009

You do not have permission to view link Log in or register now.

Conficker has gotten more than its share of coverage as probably the most important malware in the last year, but this next week will see a whole lot more. The latest variant of the worm, Conficker.C, is programmed to do something on April 1. Exactly what it's going to do and how big a deal it will be for all of us, nobody can really say for sure.

The A and especially B variants of this worm (also known as Downadup) built a botnet in the several million system range, almost exclusively through exploitation of the MS08-067 vulnerability in Windows. Conficker added some innovative techniques to update itself though a large number of domains, the names of which were algorithmically generated by the program. Because the names were deterministic, it was possible for the DNS authorities (VeriSign, et al) to block the names and, with few exceptions, the worm has been unable to spread since that point several weeks ago.

Then C came along. It adds a number of defensive measures designed to protect itself from detection and removal and it ...

******
see also

You do not have permission to view link Log in or register now.

 

[universal4]

I read many of the tech industry magazines on a regular basis and although they do think conficker is a bad worm, they are not talking of the doom-and-gloom as is the mainstream media.....but then of course this was also true of the y2k problem....code red and a few others.

Code Red was so severe and had such coverage since the White House was the main target... (whew I remember that one day...wow was it bad since I had many servers involved in that one...lol)

I hope at least that the industry is correct and that the media is not otherwise it could really be bad...although there very well may be some interuptions next week regardless.

Rick