Tag: botnet

16 MAY

Massive cryptocurrency botnet used leaked NSA exploits weeks before WCry

Enlarge / A cryptocurrency mining farm. (credit: Marco Krohn) On Friday, Ransomware called WannaCry used leaked hacking tools stolen from the National Security Agency to attack an estimated 200,000 computers in 150 countries. On Monday, researchers said the same weapons-grade attack kit was used in a much earlier and possibly larger-scale hack that made infected […]

19 APR

Vigilante botnet infects IoT devices before blackhats can hijack them

Enlarge (credit: Seth Anderson) Mirai, the botnet that threatened the Internet as we knew it last year with record-setting denial-of-service attacks, is facing an existential threat of its own: A competing botnet known as Hajime has infected at least 10,000 home routers, network-connected cameras, and other so-called Internet of Things devices. Hajime uses a decentralized […]

11 APR

Feds deliver fatal blow to botnet that menaced world for 7 years

Enlarge (credit: manley099) Federal prosecutors say they’ve dealt a fatal blow to Kelihos, a network of more than 10,000 infected computers that was used to deliver spam, steal login passwords, and deliver ransomware and other types of malware since 2010. The US Justice Department announced the takedown on Monday, one day after authorities in Spain […]

12 MAR

Russia used a cybercriminal’s botnet for a spying campaign

It’s no secret that the lines between state-sponsored hacking and cybercrime are fuzzy. After all, relying on professional crooks offers plausible deniability if the intruders are ever caught. However, it’s now apparent that those lines sometimes disappear altogether. The New York Times reports that Russian intelligence ‘piggybacked’ on criminal hacker Evgeniy Bogachev’s now-defunct botnet, GameOver […]

07 FEB

CRISPR, ‘binge-watch’ and ‘botnet’ are now in the dictionary

The vocabulary experts who decide which terms get added to the Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary are at it again. Today, over 1,000 new words made the cut from fields like science, tech, medicine pop culture, sports and more. Among the new additions are CRISPR, botnet and binge-watch alongside microbiome, truther, SCOTUS and FLOTUS. Other notable new entries […]