Provided by CommunityDNS, the information in this post consists of news items in the security-based Internet community.

Bot herders hide master control channel in Google cloud

Google’s “AppEngine” application was used by cybercriminals to act as the master control channel, feeding commands to large networks of infected computers.

Also, it was found that the Koobface botnet was using Google Reader to spam malicious links to social networking sites; one of which being Facebook.

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Gumblar Botnet Resurges

Known as one of the largest botnets that grew dramatically this year, Gumblar has reappeared.

Gumblar works in two ways. The first is to load malware onto sites. When users visit the sites malware is downloaded onto their computers. The second way Gumblar works is to populate websites with I-frames pointing to websites containing the malware.

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New Spamming Botnet On The Rise

Currently sending 2.5 billion spam messages globally a new Botnet, known as “Festi” has quickly jumped to the rank of 5% to 6% of all spam generated. The jump means more bots (or compromised computers) were added into its botnet with 60% located in Asia, 18% in Europe and 9% in North America.

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Practical Analysis: The Fastest-Growing Security Threat

Having grown from a few thousand a day a year ago to more than 500,000 a day SQL Injection is the fastest-growing security threat. Through the use of automated tools cybercriminals are searching for which sites are vulnerable to SQL injection. Such attacks allow hackers to break into networks that can lead to the breach of sensitive data.

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UK to push for law to retain all communications data

Citing the EU Data Retention Directive does not go far enough and to prevent serious crime and terrorism the British government is pushing for its ISPs to capture and hold data regarding instant messages, e-mail and other electronic communications. The data retained would also include data from third-party services. The data is to be retained by the respective ISPs and not in a centralized database.

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