Botnets becoming more robust
Zeus botnet used Amazon's in-the-cloud service to control bots.
New reports by MessageLabs and McAfee show that botherders have learned a lesson following the
take-down of McColo in November
last year.
McColo was a rogue ISP that was taken down after security researchers
gathered evidence of suspicious activities on the provider's network, with the takedown depriving many botnets of their command-and-control centres.
The result was that global spam levels dropped immediately and it took months
for those levels to return to their previous heights. However, while other rogue ISPs have suffered the same
fate as McColo, botnet owners have now found more robust ways to
control their networks of infected machines.
One of the new techniques is to distribute command-and-control
centres across various countries, making them less dependent on a single ISP.
Some botherders have even started to use social network sites, such as
Facebook, and micro-blogging services such as Twitter, to
control their bots.
It is not surprising, then, to hear that the Zeus botnet has been
using Amazon's EC2 cloud-based solution to control the
behaviour of its bots. Researchers at CA have discovered that a
trojan, downloaded by a user via a 'greetings card' email,
attempted to send information to a URL at Amazon, trying to
steal both the user's money and their identity.
Full reports from MessageLabs and McAfee, both in
PDF format, can be downloaded here
and here
respectively, while CA's story about the use of EC2 by
botnets can be found here.
15 December 2009
Tags:
amazon, botnet, ca, mcafee, mccolo, messagelabs, spam.
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