Botnets & Spam Creating Troubles for Users

According to Paul Ferguson, Network Architect for Trend Micro, botnets are not just confined to irritating spam pumping factories but they are emerging as big businesses for criminals too. Now the enterprises, which earlier had denied that bots were causing any harm to them, are also awakening, as reported by WIRED BLOG NETWORK on January 3, 2008.

Ferguson said that till a year ago, malware was used to spread malicious files or to infect the victims' computers but today, compromised servers are used to steal the information. These servers come with drive by downloads and they are so effective that people don't even come to know that their computers are being infected.

Professional botnet herders give their networks of infected machine on rent through black market. These networks are employed for e-mail campaigning and they are much more sophisticated and hi-tech than those who preceded them.

With the expansion of size of botnets, their capacity of sending spam and malware has also risen. They can send billions of spam mails and other malware in a week or two. In PDF spam case in August 2007, around five billion e-mails were sent in two or three weeks. So it can be estimated that billions of botnets' messages hit the inboxes before word identifies new threats.

The other prominent change, which is noticed in recent years, is increasing use of social engineering. This is why scammers are able to draw people to malicious websites.

Uriel Maimon, Senior Researcher in the office of chief technology officer for RSA, the security division of EMC, said that people are placing barriers of defenses to prevent their computers from being infected. It has given rise to use more variations to deceive defenses, as reported by PCWorld on January 7, 2008.

Dave Cole, Director of Security Response at Symantec, said that the criminals would use more techniques of deception for spreading malware. People would also get to see this technique with Storm Trojan and criminals would use new tricks to deceive people.

The attacks of spam are rising and the best way of protection against them is sending regular security updates and warnings about new kinds of spam.

Related article: Botnet Misuses Google Analytics

» SPAMfighter News - 16-01-2008

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