May 14th, 2007
The Internet Battlefield
By Jimmy Daniels
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews
A war is being waged online, it is being waged on and for your computers, and it is being paid for by spammers. These groups create huge botnets by sending out email worms, they then lease time on these botnets to spammers, who do their thing and spam the rest of us. Now, each of these groups want to own it all, and the attacks are increasing, remember the Storm Worm? This is a video showing how fast the Storm Worm spread.
War had been declared in cyberspace between the groups producing Warezov and Zhelatin. Taking into account the size of the botnets used by both groups, and their clear aim to conduct a large number of attacks, the situations was clear: this was threatening to become one of the most serious problems on the Internet in recent years.
Until now, the best known cyber conflict was that between Mydoom, Bagle and NetSky, back in spring 2004. The network was flooded with dozens of variants of these worms: they scanned victim machines for their competitors and took their place, deleting the original worm. The war was brought to an end by the arrest of 18 year old Sven Jaschan, the author of NetSky, in Germany. However, his creations remain one of the most widespread worms in mail traffic. Out of all the malware authors involved, only the authors of Bagle have remained active. It’s true that they disappeared into the shadows for a while, and didn’t react in any way to the appearance of Warezov, which is why we thought that they might have been involved in creating this worm. However, in January Bagle suddenly reappeared, and one variant of this worm became the most widespread malicious program in mail traffic. Source: Malware Evolution: January - March 2007
Your Mission: Should you choose to accept it…. We have to kill the botnets and make it a less profitable business for spammers, I have heard talk of good botnets to help remove malware such as this, but can’t find the url right now. We have to hurt the spammers by cutting off the money supply, and to do that, we need to boycott merchants who are advertised in the spam emails or websites. Bottom line. The only thing merchants understand is making money, and if they make less money because of spammers, then they will figure out a way to stop being used by spammers. Also, help you’re less technically inclined by changing their administrator accounts on XP to user accounts and make sure they have a couple programs installed to scan their computers, if you don’t want to help them, think of it as helping yourself. 
John Corliss says:
I looked and looked for that video of Storm Worm spreading, but couldn’t find it at the link you provided.
May 15th, 2007 at 2:48 am
Scott says:
The only real solution is to run an operating system whose security model isn’t broken by design.
May 15th, 2007 at 6:02 am
Jimmy says:
Hmm, it was there for me, try the direct link here http://video.tipsdr.com/item/5JXXKLFJJTC38XT7
May 15th, 2007 at 7:16 am
zipity says:
Help me out here. I run 4 machines at home on a wired/wireless network. I have WAP encription enabled on the wireless router, and every machine runs Zonealarm. I don’t see any unusual programs seeking up/down internet access. So am I immune to botnets/zombies?
May 15th, 2007 at 5:34 pm
Jimmy says:
No one is immune, you are only as strong as your weakest link, just make sure everyone logs into the computers with a regular user account and not an administrator account and you have some scanning tools/virus protection. But if someone is browsing some sites that try to stuff these programs on your computer, they are eventually going to take a hit.
May 16th, 2007 at 7:51 pm
LZW says:
Also maybe warn people not to open email spam or attempt to unsubscribe/optout from it because that just lets spammers knows they have a live one!
Even if they have to remove your name from that spam list by law, they add it to the ‘active list’ and sell it to the next spammer!
Don’t download ‘funny’ things from torrents, p2p, or web sites with names like britney spears nude.mpg.jpg.avi.doc.scr.exe… All version of windows hide known file extensions by default and they use that to trick people into running executable programs.
Even if you know a file is a program, don’t run it if it just to stupid… Like “Windows activation crack - all versions.exe is not a good program to run!
Also it’s important to set your web browser options so it is less vulnerable to “drive by downloads” and 0day exploits… If this is not possible, then you should download another browser so it is!
Some web browsers will download/run/execute/install anything that any web page tells it to!
May 17th, 2007 at 11:34 am
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June 19th, 2007 at 7:16 am