Archive for 'Malware' Category
Project Honeypot spam report
The unsung heroes at Project Honeypot have just released a short analysis of spam traffic observed over the past five years. The report 1 Billion Spammers Served “celebrates” the project receiving it’s one billionth spam message in it’s worldwide network of spam traps. Some salient points: Number of bots has quadrupled each year with nearly [...]
Read the rest of this entry...20th anniversary of the Morris Worm indictment
On July 26 1989, the first U.S. indictment for spreading malware was issued. The Morris Worm, the first Internet worm, was released by Cornell grad student Robert Morris back in November 1988 that infected maybe 10% of Internet-connected machines. It exploited a vulnerability in Sendmail and fingerd to propagate itself. The worm didn’t do anything [...]
Read the rest of this entry...Conficker detection and containment tools
Just in time for the April 1 timebomb, the HoneyNet Project and other researchers have released tools for detecting the major conficker variants, preventing infection, and preventing them from phoning home for payloads. From Containing Conficker: tools and info you can download: Lists and generators for domain names that Downadup/ConfickerA, B, and C try to [...]
Read the rest of this entry...Detecting botnet infections for free
Botnet clients are rarely detected by antivirus software. The only effective way of detecting them is by monitoring outbound network traffic. Smaller organizations rarely have the skill resources for that. Fortunately, free resources exist to monitor outbound malicious activity originating from your netblocks.
Read the rest of this entry...Open source ClamAV beats McAfee and Norton
A little anti-virus “bake off” organized by security gateway vendor Untangle has found that popular open source ClamAV has very good detection rates compared to commercial anti-virus products. In an informal test using variations of the EICAR test pattern plus 25-odd “in the wild” and community-submitted malware, Kaspersky scored the highest overall detection rate, with [...]
Read the rest of this entry...