http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9183299/Botnet_takedown_may_yield_valuable_data By Jeremy Kirk IDG News Service September 2, 2010 Researchers are hoping to get a better insight on botnets after taking down part of Pushdo, one of the top five networks of hacked computers responsible for most of the world's spam. Thorsten Holz, an assistant professor of computer science at Ruhr-University in Bochum, Germany, said his group is working on an academic paper focused on methods to figure out what type of malicious spamming software is on a computer that sent a particular spam e-mail. They looked at several of the major spamming botnets, including Mega-D, Lethic, Rustock as well as Pushdo and Cutwail, two kinds of malware that appear to sometimes work together as part of the same botnet. Holz said they found that Pushdo had a special characteristic in that more than half of its command-and-control servers were concentrated within one hosting company. Botnets use command-and-control servers to issue instructions to the infected PC, such as uploading spam templates and the target e-mail addresses to send spam. [...] _______________________________________________________ Subscribe to InfoSec News - www.infosecnews.org http://www.infosecnews.org/mailman/listinfo/isnReceived on Thu Sep 02 2010 - 23:28:34 PDT
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