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
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