If you run a vBulletin forum, you may have noticed a sharp rise in new user registrations. At first it seems like a good thing, but then the registrations start coming in so quickly it probably set off an internal alarm bell. Listen to it. Security experts have discovered that spammers have discovered a way more »

When RockYou.com’s servers were breached last month, 32 million passwords were stolen and posted on the Internet. RockYou committed a grave error by storing them in clear text instead of encrypting them. Security researchers at Imperva analyzed the findings and came up with some interesting findings, among them that the most popular password is “123456”, more »

Comcast has announced a new program that will alert customers when suspicious activity is detected coming from their computers. The alerts will pop up on the homepage and be triggered by such things a sudden and sharp spike in traffic coming from a customer’s IP, known bot behavior and customer IPs showing up on blacklists more »

Summer is in full swing as are the companies making moves that make Katherine Heigl movies look good. This week: the world went nuts without twitter, the spammers are back, Google goes offline, and the future of television.

Today let’s take a look at botnets. This is the tool of choice for spammers everywhere. A botnet is a collection of computers, known as zombies, that have been infected by malware. The malware enables the criminal in charge of the group, also known as the bot master, to control all the infected computers remotely. Botnets are used to send spam, conduct DDoS attacks and distribute even more malware. They range in size from tens of thousands to millions of zombies.

A botnet begins its life as a single or group of servers sending out malware. As more and more computers become infected with the malicious software, the botnet grows. Large botnets are capable of sending out billions of spam messages a day. Most advertise fake pharmaceuticals or porn sites. The infected computers are programmed to contact the control server at specific times to receive updates or new instructions.

A U.S. judge has shut down an ISP after FTC complaints that it offered a haven to spammers, child pornographers, hackers, and more. ISP Pricewert, also known as 3FN and APS Telecom has been disconnected from the net. The FTC claimed the ISP deliberately advertised to malware distributors, botnet servers, spammers, illegal porn sites and more »

Infamous ISP Intercage (also known as Atrivo) has been knocked off line. Their upstream provider, Pacific Internet Exchange terminated their service. Intercage’s president, Emil Kacperski, blames Spamhaus. Spamhaus, an anti-spam organization that puts together a widely used blacklist, has been very critical of Intercage for years. It placed Pacific Internet Exchange on its blacklist on September 12th, and although a PIE spokeperson refused comment, it’s highly likely they cut off Intercage as a result,

MySpace has won its lawsuit against infamous spammer Sanford Wallace, dubbed the “Spam King”. MySpace was awarded a legal judgment after Wallace ignored numerous requests to turn over documents and ultimately failed to show up in court. The suit was filed last year, accusing Wallace of running a phishing scam to access MySpace profiles and then using them to spam thousands of other users in an effort to get them to visit his website. Wallace claimed that since he was not accepting mail or packages, he had missed all the notifications of his court dates. The court didn’t buy it.

An anonymous programmer going by the name “John Wane” has claimed to have cracked Yahoo’s CAPTCHA software. CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) software is used by most major websites, including Yahoo, MySpace, Amazon, and others, to prevent automated systems from creating thousands of accounts to send spam with. Everyone’s seen it. When you register on a site, you’re presented with an image containing a jumbled “code” and you must enter it correctly to continue. “John Wane” posted code for a decoder he claimed could get around that step and has an accuracy rate of 35%.

TorPark is a new browser that has been developed by an activist group for human rights and privacy called Hactivismo. The new browser is based on securing user privacy. It works off of the network of Tor servers referred to commonly as “Onion Servers.” The Tor servers mask your identity by rerouting your web traffic more »