Posts Tagged ‘botnet’

Security experts from Fire Eye took Command and Control over a botnet responsible for 30 percent of the worlds spam.

A botnet is a mass network of "Zombie" Computers that send spam worldwide

The network of zombie machines, also known as ‘Mega-D’ and ‘Ozdok’,  were examined by security firms and were ‘Hijacked’ by the researchers and sent out new commands to cease and desist.  The spam from this network stopped, and ISP’s networks were saved, for now.  Users won’t notice much of a difference, but ISP’s that have exhausted resources to filter spam have a lighter load.

Over 250,000 IP’s were found to be controlled by this massive botnet.    Now its a huge clean up job to rid the machines of the leftover bots.  ISP’s will work with FireEye to identify these machines.

The takedown effort is significant because it shows that a relatively small company can defeat a for-profit network that took extraordinary measures to ensure it remained operational. Not only did Ozdok reserve a long list of domain names as command and control channels, it also used hard-coded DNS servers. When all else failed, its software was able to dynamically generate new domain names on the fly.  -The Register

For now, the botnet was outsmarted, but they only get more sophisticated. The only way you can protect yourself is to use security measures such as updating software when needed to patch security holes and using proper firewalls and anti-virus. If you think you are a victim of a botnet, contact a qualified repair company such as iRemedy, to get checked out and secured.