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Botnets Are Ready To Deal(Information Week Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) A price war that's driving the going rate to send 1 million spam e-mails below $100 may be at least partially responsible for a recent increase in spam and botnet activity on the Internet. The operators of Nugache, one of the Web's most sophisticated emerging botnets, appear to be expanding their network and slashing prices, says researcher Paul Henry, VP of technology evangelism at Secure Computing. "There's a price war going on, and Nugache is becoming the bargain basement," Henry says. Such bot-driven e-mails are used to fuel pump-and-dump stock campaigns and other scams. Botnets also are changing to avoid losing the zombie computers they have. Henry has seen them installed with a hacked version of antivirus software, so the PC will appear protected. Or the botnet will patch vulnerabilities on a PC so it won't be seen as a risk. Nugache is older than the Storm botnet and has been slower to grow, but it operates in much the same way: spreading as a malware worm, evolving and repacking itself to avoid signature-based defenses. Like Storm, it also uses a peer-to-peer architecture that doesn't require a command-and-control system, and its devices change IP addresses every 300 seconds to avoid detection. If there's an upside to the growing threat of another bot to rival Storm, it's that companies might consider security tools beyond signature-based products, Henry says, since they "aren't much use against these types of botnets." http://informationweek.com/ Copyright 2008 CMP Media LLC. All rights reserved. Copyright ? 2007 CMP Media LLC |