Microsoft is acting against the growing Nitol botnet that it claims has been activated by malware sneaked thru PC suppliers.
Richard Boscovich, assistant general counsel in Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit, said the Nitol botnet originates and spreads from vulnerable supply chains where cybercriminals inserted fake software diffused with malware.
The software giant said it is trying hard to figure out how to cut off the malware strains used and has had rough success in disinfesting the Nitol …

Security experts on Wednesday claimed that they have finally killed the world’s third-largest botnet, the Grum botnet.
In a post on their blog, security firm FireEye through its expert Atif Mushtaq announced that Grum has finally been wrestled out of the control of its creators on Wednesday.
At its most active point, the Grum botnet was sending out about 18 billion spam emails daily.
“Based on the latest statistics from M86Security, Grum is currently responsible for 17.4% of worldwide spam …

Computer scientists have found proof of what likely is the world’s first across-the-board smartphone botnet that allegedly runs on compromised Android devices owned by subscribers from an extensive list of developing countries.
In a brief blog exposing claimed evidence, Terry Zink, a Program Manager for Microsoft Forefront Online Security, said he had found that pharma spam originating from Yahoo’s emailing service carried a controversial signature, “Sent from Yahoo! Mail on Android”, …

Smartphones and tablets powered by the Google-spearheaded Android mobile operating system have been hijacked by a botnet, a Microsoft engineer has revealed.
Writing on his MSDN blog, Terry Zink says that botnet operators are controlling Android devices to send out spam.
For the uninitiated, botnets are infected computers that hijackers pilfer information from or use to either send out spam messages or to carry out actions like distributed denial-of-service attacks.
However, botnets usually are …

A new virus has infected more than 600,000 Apple computers around the world. As explained by experts from a Russian computer security firm, “Dr. Web”, a Trojan called BackDoor.Flashback penetrates into the computers running operating system Mac OS X and creates a botnet – a network of infected “Mac’s”. Subsequently, the attackers can use it to organize DDoS-attacks or send spam.
As clarified by CNET, FlashBack was discovered in September 2011. It penetrated into Mac computers …

A defendant of the lawsuit filed by Microsoft in Virginia, Dominique Alexander Piatti, has been cleared after a deal with the Windows operating system maker which was announced on Wednesday.

Dominique Alexander Piatti has been cleared for allegedly helping host the Kelihos botnet. Image: PeterWood / Flickr (CC)

Piatti has been named a defendant of the suit as his company’s subdomain cz.cc was found to have had been used to host the Kelihos botnet.
According to Microsoft counsel Richard …