Tag archive: botnets

In a yearly study conducted by the Ponemon Institute and funded by Hewlett-Packard, the median cost of dealing with prevention and the repercussions of cybercrime rose from $3.8 million a year in 2010 to $5.9 million a year in 2011. Over the 50 companies in the study, the range of costs varied from $1.5 million to $36.5 million per organization. Over the four-week period of the study, all the organizations put up with 72 successful attacks a… Read More

The shady world of botnets and malware distribution is always full of surprises, and few of them are pleasant. However, a recent development might just fall into that category: security researchers have noted that the command-and-control servers that manage the infamous Rustock botnet have gone offline. Rustock is one of the largest sources of email spam on the Internet, and its newfound silence has created a significant decline in the amount… Read More

A funny thing happened over the end-of-year 2010 holiday season: levels of spam email on the Internet declined precipitously, with Symantec's MessageLabs reporting that levels have dropped to the lowest point since the shutdown of spam-friendly ISP McColo back in 2008. And while the decline seems to be attributable to three major botnets shutting down…nobody knows why those botnets might have gone quiet. “At present we… Read More

Comcast Corp. wants to enlist its customers in a fight against a huge problem for Internet providers — the armies of infected personal computers, known as “botnets,” that suck up bandwidth by sending spam and facilitating cybercrime. The country's largest provider of high-speed Internet to homes started testing a service this week in Denver in which Comcast sends customers a pop-up message in their Web browsers if their… Read More