Web threats

Over this past weekend VKontakte was targeted by a new network worm – Rovud. The first variant was detected early on May 16. The worm is simple in execution, but original nevertheless.

This article discusses zombie networks or botnets: how they are created, who uses them to make money on them and how this is done. Readers who are already familiar with the subject will find the information on the latest trends in botnet development of interest.

Last night, on the eve of April Fool’s Day, we started seeing a wave of new modifications of the notorious Zhelatin worm.

March 2008 proved to be somewhat atypical in terms of malicious code in mail traffic.

Amazingly, for the second month in a row, not only has the leader of our Top Twenty not changed but the three programs at the top of the ranking have remained the same.

It’s been some time since we’ve seen an adware program at the top of our online rankings.

This annual report provides an overview the evolution of malware, adware and potentially malicious programs in 2007, and compares this data to that of 2006.

Email is known to be one of the most popular infection vectors. This article specifically analyses malware which is distributed via email.

This paper presents a method to automatically separate and block those networks in real time. The method uses a statistical approach exploiting the fact that computers in a botnet have to have some similarities in their behavior.

In November, our online statistics returned to their usual state of flux: there are 11 new malicious programs in the Top Twenty, a new leader and it’s very unclear what the future may hold

HMRC [Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs] has mislaid two disks containing personal data

If this month’s Top Twenty had been prepared using data from the first 26 days of October, two important malware related events would have been missing

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve been closely following the behaviour of a botnet with a C&C (command and control) center based on a popular web-based engine.

The growth only stopped early yesterday evening – around 5pm Moscow time – when the overall total number of zombies was about 14000!

Today we saw a sad, but typical picture: a small botnet with an approximately 8600 zombie machines suddenly exploded and began to grow very quickly.