As I’ve already commented today…. there has been a massive trackback spam swarm going on the last 24 hours. I’ve now racked up 1300 or so in the Akismet filter on this site and another 150 or so on another two sites. Akismet has been very impressive in defending this attack. Only 1% of the trackbacks slipped through, or about 14 or so across three sites. I’ve looked to see what other measures I can take against trackback spam and found one that looks like it should eliminate the 1% that got through.
Tag: Blue Security
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Nugache the latest in bot-net technology… and why you should care about botnets…
To show you where the threat with bot networks is going there’s a story today on Nugache (Symantec summary) which is a bot that takes advantage of a number of clever tricks to avoid having the whole bot net shut down, allow command and control on an encrypted channel and essentially have no “human readable strings” in any of it’s communications. The encryption of it’s connections makes it harder for IDS to catch it (as they rely on signatures of traffic.
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The spammers win a round
There is a company (well, unfortunately, WAS a company) called Blue Security. They had an innovative approach to stopping spam. A small download essentially sent opt-out return emails that were junk back to the REAL spam sender (clever concept huh? bouncing to the person that REALLY sent the message… Of course what was clever here was that they were coordinating the responses of all their users – herding a “white hat” network of sorts.) Anyway, it was a successful concept at getting several of the top 10 to clean their mailing lists.It looks as though 6 of the top 10 agreed to clean up their mailing lists. Unfortunately, they were the subject of a Massive DDOS. They managed to recover and come back, but the dDos took out other sites as well and there were threats of more it seems.