Botnets becoming more robust

Zeus botnet used Amazon’s in-the-cloud service to control bots.

New reports by

MessageLabs

and

McAfee

show that botherders have learned a lesson following the take-down of

McColo

in

November last year

.

McColo

was a rogue ISP that was taken down after security researchers gathered evidence of suspicious activities on the provider’s network, with the takedown depriving many botnets of their command-and-control centres. The result was that global spam levels dropped immediately and it took months for those levels to return to their previous heights. However, while

other rogue ISPs

have suffered the same fate as

McColo

, botnet owners have now found more robust ways to control their networks of infected machines.

One of the new techniques is to distribute command-and-control centres across various countries, making them less dependent on a single ISP. Some botherders have even started to use social network sites, such as

Facebook

, and micro-blogging services such as

Twitter

, to control their bots.

It is not surprising, then, to hear that the

Zeus

botnet has been using

Amazon

‘s

EC2

cloud-based solution to control the behaviour of its bots. Researchers at

CA

have discovered that a trojan, downloaded by a user via a ‘greetings card’ email, attempted to send information to a URL at

Amazon

, trying to steal both the user’s money and their identity.

Full reports from

MessageLabs

and

McAfee

, both in PDF format, can be downloaded

here

and

here

respectively, while

CA

‘s story about the use of

EC2

by botnets can be found

here

.

Posted on 15 December 2009 by

Virus Bulletin