Archive for July, 2007

Peacomm Postcards Are Not Randomly Appearing

July 30, 2007 by Jose Nazario

I decided to look a the sources of postcard spams related to Peacomm that I had measured. I honestly expected less variance in the arrival dates and a lot more variance in the download locations. I don’t see any patterns like “Don’t spam on a weekend” afoot here, or anything suggesting they’re avoiding any specific […]

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From Elk Cloner to Peacomm: A quarter century of malware

July 18, 2007 by Jose Nazario

A quarter century of malware. You’d think we would have had this problem licked by now, yeah? No, not even close. Self replicating code was first theorized in 1949, the dawn of the computing age, and appeared in the wild around the early 1980s. The fundamental theories on computer viruses were worked out by Fred […]

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Network Disruptions: VNC and TCP Port 5405

July 2, 2007 by Jose Nazario

In an article yesterday entitled A glitch in the Matrix, or a hungry exploit?, reporters at The Register were asking about Internet outages. This article seems to suggest that TCP port 5901 (VNC) scanning is to blame. VNC is Virtual Network Computing, a way of accessing one’s PC from another using simple software. It’s much […]

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When Spambots Attack — Each Other!

July 1, 2007 by Danny McPherson

So, you’ve read plenty about when botnets attack. You’ve also seen plenty about when spambots attack, though it’s usually only in the form of spam email flooding in the course of spambot offspring performing the functions for which their creator intended. There’s even been plenty of press about when Botnets Battle Over Turf, […]

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