Fergie's Tech Blog

Imperfect Storm Aids Spammers

Robert Lemos writes on SecurityFocus:

For 24 hours in mid-January, stock-fraud investigation site StockPatrol disappeared from the Internet, overwhelmed by a massive flood of Web requests coming from thousands of sources.

The attack came after the site wrote a handful of reports investigating and condemning the practice of pump-and-dump stock spam campaigns. No fewer than three bot nets targeted StockPatrol as well as another anti-spam site and at least five command-and-control servers associated with a different virus, Warezov, according to an analysis released last week.

"StockPatrol.com was the victim of a cyberspace assault that evidently was calculated to disable our site and make our reports inaccessible," read a statement posted on January 17. "In this instance the attack was massive."

At the heart of the attack was a single program designed specifically to co-opt victims' computers to aid in sending stock-touting e-mail messages and to participate in denial-of-service attacks--Storm Worm.

posted by Fergie @ 2/16/2007 03:47:00 PM