One threat has evolved and dominated the threats landscape like no other: botnets. Practically every day a new set of online criminals attempt to exploit users in some way or the other. The best way to stop this threat at the perimeter is to identify its communication channel and block the bot from connecting to Read more…
One threat has evolved and dominated the threats landscape like no other: botnets. Practically every day a new set of online criminals attempt to exploit users in some way or the other. The best way to stop this threat at the perimeter is to identify its communication channel and block the bot from connecting to Read more…
Web advertisers got a nasty surprise this week after the discovery of the “Chameleon” botnet, a network of thousands of computers stealing millions of dollars through fake adverts. To-date, researchers have found over 120,000 home PCs infected with Chameleon, and they estimate the bot costs advertisers a whopping $6 million per month. That sounds like Read more…
While monitoring a Russian underground forum recently, we came across a discussion about a Trojan for sale that can steal credit card information from machines running Windows for financial transactions and credit card payments. The malware, vSkimmer, can detect the card readers, grab all the information from the Windows machines attached to these readers, and Read more…
In the quarterly McAfee Threats Reports we offer our readers some charts on the prevalence of messaging botnets. For the last quarter of 2012, we announced the continuing decline in global messaging botnet infections as well as in former leaders Festi and Cutwail (see page 23). In this blog, I will detail the evolution of Read more…
While working on the release of the latest version of the McAfee Network Security Platform, which offers advanced malware and botnet protection, we tested a sample of the malware Red October. With the help of our in-house advanced botnet analysis framework, we analyzed the network traffic generated by this sample and tracked its communications with the Read more…