"Information Warfare: The Russian Cyber War Army Attacks"

[Paul Vixie <paul () vix com>]

(thanks to hank nussbacher for noticing and sharing this.)

http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htiw/articles/20061122.aspx

...400,000 Internet users were knocked off the net for several hours by a DDOS
(Distributed Denial of Service) attack. The attack came from outside the area,
and was apparently arranged by the Kirghiz secret police, in an attempt to
disrupt pro-democracy groups that are trying to get some honest elections.

The Kirghizstan attack apparently was actually a minor operation compared to
what Russian Cyber Criminals have, over the past few weeks, done to cause a
noticeable increase (67 percent since August) in spam (especially emails
touting thinly held, low price, stocks, for what is called a "pump and dump"
scheme.) This flood of spam was delivered by a botnet of some 73,000 PCs,
secretly infected with software that enables the crooks to take over the
infected PC and use it for sending spam (over a billion emails a day), or
launching DDOS attacks. This particular botnet (called SpamThru by its owners)
has taken control of PCs in 166 countries, although about half of them are in
the United States. This botnet also takes pains to seek out and delete botnet
software from other criminals, in PCs it has infected. PCs with fast Internet
connections are the most prized, and apparently the criminal gangs are now
fighting each other for control of the fast PCs. 

...
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