It may sound like a broken record, but spam continues to do just that -- break records. Unwanted commercial e-mail is growing by electronic leaps and bounds: An Internet-buckling 60 billion to 150 billion messages per day. Put another way: A whopping 83% of all e-mail comes from suspicious Internet addresses. Spam is up 100% from a year ago because "there still is money to be made from marketing Viagra and get-rich-quick schemes," says David Mayer, a product manager at e-mail security firm IronPort Systems, the Cisco Systems division that sponsored the report. Wasn't it Bill Gates who famously said a few years ago that spam would be eradicated? "It was one of the rare times he was wrong," Mayer says.
By Jon Swartz
USA Today
Computer 'bots' now aimed at corporate PCs
The computer networks of corporate America are under attack -- often from their own computers. Those are among the sobering conclusions of a forthcoming report on bots, as well as the observations of a senior researcher at a leading PC security company.
Bots are compromised PCs that are remotely controlled by cybercrooks to spread spam and carry out online scams. Consumer PCs make up the lion’s share of bots. Increasingly, however, cybercrooks are targeting certain industries -- namely, financial services, health-care providers and automakers -- with the intent of turning computers within companies into bots to steal sensitive data, says Uriel Maimon, senior researcher at RSA, the security division of EMC. Maimon monitors bot activity on the Internet.
Maimon says one in 10 PCs at major auto makers are believed to be bots, collecting data for corporate espionage. He suspects the Chinese government, or operatives working on behalf of that government, are behind recent attacks. If not state-sponsored, the bot scam is occurring with the tacit approval or indifference of government officials, he claims.
At the same time, distributed denial of service attacks (DDOS) -- assaulting websites with a deluge of data to slow down or shutter targeted sites -- remain a chief use of bots, says a forthcoming report by computer-security firm Arbor Networks. Cybercrooks use the threat of a DDOS to extort protection money from businesses keen to keep their websites running.
The rise in DDOS attacks over the past year underscore that bots -- whether compromised PCs of unwitting consumers and/or corporate users -- are an important tool in the shakedown of sites such as gambling sites, says Danny McPherson, chief research officer at Arbor Networks. Full results of Arbor Network’s report will be posted Sept. 17.
By Jon Swartz
http://blogs.usatoday.com/technologylive/
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