Mariposa Botnet

Understanding Bots as a technology has emerged as a critical skill in the information era. This article is focused in understanding Mariposa. Botnet Mariposa was reported by defense intelligence some time during May of 2009. Trend micro says that the worm has been in existence as early as December 2008. It is learnt that the reported botnet was named after the Spanish word for "butterfly" as documented across the Internet. It had silently enrolled almost 13 million computers in more than 190 countries. 

Flame

The Flame worm that has targeted computers in the Middle East is being called "the most sophisticated cyberweapon yet unleashed" by Kaspersky Lab researchers who discovered it The virus reportedly captures sensitive information through a variety of means — “sniffing” data sent across the Internet and internal networks, recording keystrokes, capturing screenshots while applications like messaging programs are running, even turning on a computer’s built-in microphone and recording audio of conversations, according to three cyber labs that detected it.

Computer Security Day - 2012

 Computer Security Day is an annual event that is observed worldwide. This event is observed to increase the security awareness and the need for best practices to be adopted with computer operations.  It is evident that the exponential increase in computing gadgets miss out on the aspects of the need for security. Security is an important consideration when working with computers, the Internet or indeed any electronic devices. The focus of security day is to create awareness on the aspects of security and information management.

Sality

Sality is a file-infecting virus that has been around for more than nine years. Sality has been ranked by Symantec as the number one malicious code family in 2010 by number of endpoint detections. It was apparently named after the Russian town of “Salavat City”, although the command and control servers are thought to be in the US, UK, and the Netherlands. It has been used to push spam, steal passwords, crack SIP accounts, and various other nasty things. 

Zeus botnet - Operation b71

Zeus, often referred as Zbot is one of the popular crimeware  botnet typically engaged in data theft.  The term Zeus is used to refer to an entire family of trojans and their respective bot nets. It was reported by 2007. Zeus botnets are fundamentally simple computer networks otherwise called as a group of interconnected computers,  built by a group of interested parties with a criminal motive,  using the Zeus infection crimeware toolkits. The Microsoft blog claims that it has detected more than 13 million suspected infections of this malware worldwide, with more than 3 million in the United States alone.

For a better understanding, Zeus is a toolkit pack which aids a the user with a tool set required to build and administer a botnet. These tools are designed with a focus of stealing banking information. However they can also be used used for other types of data or identity theft.  The toolkit is a marketable product of commercial value, which is sold to potential customers. They are also distributed freely. Like most botnet families, standards framework, Win32/Zbot is built on the client-server model and requires a command and control (C&C) server to which the bots connect to receive instructions from the botnet operator.