The Alueron botnet, also known as TDL or TDSS, has reached the 4.5 million-strong status. As well, it has been deemed “practically indestructible.” Coreflood, Rustock, and Waledac are all bots that were successfully disrupted by law enforcement. However, Alueron has made disruption very difficult.
TDL-4, as it’s named, has been specifically designed to avoid destruction. This includes law enforcement, anti-virus software, as well as competing botnets. When installed, TDL-4 will remove other rootkits, something that most others aren’t capable of. This helps for TDL-4 to remain undetected, and users will more than likely not notice that their system is behaving strangely. To get an idea of how undetectable this botnet is, here is a graph:
Alueron has included peer-to-peer technology in the botnet code. The rootkit uses the Kad p2p network, used by filesharing software eMule. This is done to communicate between nodes, creating its own network of infected computers, and allowing the machines to communicate with each other without relying on a central server.
The reason this is done is to make it harder to take down the network. Usually, law enforcement agencies take over or take down the centralized command-and-control servers used to send instructions for the network. However, if they cannot do that, then these agencies will have to develop new means to taking down the botnet.
This isn’t the first time that rootkits have used peer-to-peer networks. However, they have never been used in such a large, public scale. This gives the botnet an extremely robust communications system that will be next to impossible to disrupt or take over. The techniques used to take down other botnets will prove to be almost completely useless against TDL-4.
As usual, this botnet is used for common spamming and DDoS attacks. However, the botnet’s operators have added someone interesting for users and supporters. For approximately $100 a month, users can use a PC in the botnet as a proxy for your Internet traffic, anonymizing your traffic. There is even a Firefox plugin to make it easier to use the proxy system.
Will law enforcement agencies be able to take down this botnet? Only time will tell.
Source: Ars Technica
No, that’s not that giant penny. Yes, that’s a mm-scaled computing system.
How much did your computer cost? No, I don’t mean the monitor and all, I’m talking just the computer. There is a new computer coming around town, and her name is Mira. This supercomputer is worth an estimated $50 million. Where are they going to put such an expensive piece of equipment? Well of course, the land of the cold air, Minnesota. Yeah, that’s right. The computer that is going to be the biggest and fastest in the whole world is going right at IBM in Rochester, Minnesota.
This is one of those things that seems so unnatural it almost make me recoil in horror. There’s a company making a tablet computer that is similar to an e-reader that bends. I don’t know how far you can bend it before it breaks, but the fact that you can bend the thing to begin with is enough to give me goosebumps. I also play saxophone and once had a friend seriously damage his instrument where the top part of the instrument was bent at a very awkward angle. It reminded of looking at someone with a broken arm. When I saw this bending tablet, I had the same reaction.
With the push to be more environmentally friendly, being resourceful and practical needs to be equal. I think this laptop bag fills both purposes. It’s got solar energy cells to run your laptop for five hours. That way you can save on your laptop battery and use less electricity when plugging it in. I may have to give this a try.