A bit of advice from the folks at the CBL, posted with permission and some light editing. I’ve been seeing some folks report longer connection times at some places, and this might explain some of it. It’s certainly possible, even likely, that the large ISPs are getting a lot of this kind of traffic. A botnet, likely a variant of cutwail, has been for the past several years been...
Earlier this year the Exploratorium was the victim of a phishing attack. They’ve posted an article on what happened and how they discovered and dealt with the issue. But they didn’t just report on the attack, they dissected it. And, as is appropriate for a organization with a mission of education, they mapped out what they discovered during the investigation. There are a couple of...
Virus bulletin has an interesting post about DMARC and how some criminals are protecting their emails with DMARC.
It’s something many people don’t think about, but the majority of the traffic coming into the SMTP port is malicious. Spam is passively malicious, in that it just uses resources and bothers people. But there is a lot of actively malicious traffic coming into the SMTP port. Email is used as a vector to spread viruses and other malware. Email is also used for phishing and scamming. Many...
There are a whole host of different botnets. One botnet run by Rove Digital infected computers with viruses that changed their DNS settings, giving the botnet runners the ability to control how the infected computers viewed the Internet. The criminals behind the DNS Changer virus were arrested in November of last year. The court ordered the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) to operate replacement...
The US government is looking at telling ISPs how to deal with compromised customers and botnets. They’re a bit late to the party, though. Most of the major commercial ISPs have been implementing significant botnet controls for many years now. Control involves a number of different techniques, but notification has been designed into the system from day 1. “There is no need for mandated...
There’s been a heavy uptick in botnet spam over the last few days, judging by things I’m hearing and my own mailboxes. There are a few common subject lines, but all of them are trying to get recipients to either run programs or visit malicious web pages. The first subject line I’m seeing a lot of is “<name> wants to be friends with you on facebook!” In my...
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