Ghosts of Botnets Past, Present, and Future
‘Twas the morning of October 21st, and all through the house many IoT devices were stirring, including a connected mouse. Of course, this wasn’t the night before Christmas, but rather the morning of Dyn — the 2016 DDoS attack on the service provider that took the entire East Coast offline ...
Beware: Zombie IoT Botnets
The ghosts and ghouls of October have come and gone, but the dangers lurking behind virtual walls have hardly disappeared. The threat of zombie bots is real, and it exists 365 days out of the year. Zombie bots, or devices that are taken over by hackers to disseminate different types ...
What Drives a Ransomware Criminal? CoinVault Developers Convicted in Dutch Court
How often do we get a chance to learn what goes on in the minds of cybercriminals? Two members of McAfee’s Advanced Threat Research team recently did, as they attended a court case against two cybercriminal brothers. The brothers, Dennis and Melvin, faced a judge in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands. ...
VPNFilter Malware Adds Capabilities to Exploit Endpoints
VPNFilter, a botnet-controlled malware that infects networking devices, was first documented by researchers from Cisco Talos. McAfee Labs also published a blog on May 23 with some initial information. In our last post we discussed the three stages of infection and the devices affected by the malware, and how it ...
VPNFilter Botnet Targets Networking Devices
VPNFilter is a botnet with capabilities to support both intelligence collection and destructive cyberattack operations. The Cisco Talos team recently notified members of the Cyber Threat Alliance (CTA) of its findings and published this blog.
Necurs Botnet Leads the World in Sending Spam Traffic
In Q4 2017 we found that the Necurs and Gamut botnets comprised 97% of spam botnet traffic. (See the McAfee Labs Threats Report, March 2018.) Necurs (at 60%) is currently the world’s largest spam botnet. The infected computers operate in a peer-to-peer model, with limited communication between the nodes and ...
What Is a Botnet?
Robot armies on attack may sound like science fiction, but this is a security reality we’ve been facing for some time. You may have heard of recent threats where popular websites were knocked completely offline, or servers were forced to mine for cryptocurrencies by giant “botnets”. But you might not ...
Chinese Cybercriminals Develop Lucrative Hacking Services
Underground cybercrime profits in China have likely already exceeded US$15.1 billion (100 billion Chinese yuan); caused more than $13.8 billion (91.5 billion yuan) worth of damage relating to data loss, identity theft, and fraud; and will grow at an even faster pace as underground hackers expand international business operations to ...
Meet IoT_reaper: The New Malware Building a Massive Botnet Army
WannaCry, Petya, the Dyn distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack – all now infamous cyberattacks that have defined the modern threat landscape. The latter, which was orchestrated by Mirai malware and took the entire East Coast offline, occurred exactly a year ago, so naturally a successor has emerged. Named IoT_reaper, the new ...
The Top 5 Scariest Mobile Threats
Halloween has to be one of my favorite holidays of the year. Creative costumes, buckets of candy, and pumpkin spice lattes make All Hallows’ Eve a memorable event for people of all ages. But what I love most about Halloween is the traditions associated with it: pumpkin carving, trick or ...
