The big news today about Conficker ... is that there is no news

For the moment everything looks calm. Although it is almost April 1 throughout the whole world there is not yet any news about of the end of the world. Today, the media expected big problems as result from the spreading of the worm conficker and the new "payload" that would be activated.

More than a result of a large patch campaign, I think that the famous worm exploited a large media campaign that exaggerated and overestimated its effects. I expect this to be just another day in the life of a security research. Anyway, if something happens, I will be updating my twitter and my tumbr (this is Spanish only). In case of infection or pro-action against the worm, here are some resources.

The BBC, the botnet and other DDoS attacks

No doubt that the most commented DDoS news of the week were related to the botnet that the BBC hired. In fact it was the staff of one of its programs called Click. The program's goal was to demonstrate how easy it is to hire a botnet to perform criminal activities. The botnet was used to send SPAM to a especially set account and to launch a DDoS attack to security company website's specifically set for this purpose. Although the ethics of the action has been critiqued, the fact is that they have demonstrated how easy and cheap it is to hire such services.

In other news, Jose Nazario of Arbor Networks in hiss presentation at SOURCE Boston commented about the new "trends" in cyber crime. Nazario said that cyber criminals are not just selling kits for running malicious software on unprotected computers. Now they sell services for script-kiddies and criminals who are just not good enough to use the malware by themselves. The audio of the presentation here.

The DDoS attack to the torrent site Mininova continued during this week. Here you can see some trends in traffic that the attacks have generated.

The Spanish version of this post here.

DDoS in March

To the surprise of some, the Pirate Bay website was under a DDoS attack earlier this week. Still no news about the intellectual authors. The site is stable for now.

According to an analysis of the anti-virus firm Sophos, the worm Confiker could start a DDoS attack to some sites, including Soutwest Airlines. The collateral damage would be a DoS due to the spread of the worm. The note on TechRepublic.

And the torrent's site Minova has been attacked by a DDoS. According to TorrentFreak the attack has reached the 2 Gbps peak. It seems to come from bot networks that appear to be in Germany and Argentina.

Feed Analysis

Well, this is post is more a plead for help than a real post.

I need to analyse a RSS feed that I have been generating by searching for twitts related to DoS and DDoS attacks. In order to do it soon and with not so much effort I would like to avoid programming something (may be using feed parser or XML_RSS). What I would like to do is:

1. Get the average post per day, week and month
2. Get the average for a specific week and month
3. Get the all items for a specific date
4. If possible, to graph the number of items by day, week and month

If somebody knows a webservice to do that, please let me know to my e-mail, by a comment here or just send me a twitt. I would really appreciate!

Practical Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

I gave this presentation yesterday in Ignite UK North in Leeds. It is about Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, it contains a little bit of theory, practical examples and some resources to dig a little bit more on the topic. It does not go very deep in details though.



Le Monde (the translated version here) reports that the web site of the French Embassy  in China has been inaccessible for a few days. The cause is an apparently DDoS. The attack seems to be a consequence of the political tensions between China and France as result of the meeting of the french president Sarkozy with the Dalai Lama in Poland.

This is another case of the infamous cyber-war.

 

New DoS and DDoS coming?

  The SANS Internet Storm Center reports that some worms exploiting the new Microsoft RPC vulnerability (MS08-067) are been seen on the wild. As I wrote before (here for the automatic translation by Google) this is critical vulnerability from the same family that brought us worms as Blaster. 

Fortunately as mentioned by Steve Gibson in Security Now the Internet has changed a lot from those past experiences. Today most Windows XP (with SP2) and Windows Vista hosts have the firewall on by default that minimizes the risk of infection. However many Windows 2000, 98 and 95 computers, most of them forgotten in some computer room are still in a high risk. I wonder if this will be another endemic disease that will be living in the Internet as their cousins.

Here there is the report from F-Secure for the interested people. And, wait for at least some minor disruptions generated by compromised machines.