Dennis Fisher

When you hear about botnets such as Rustock, Mariposa or Grum being taken down, one of the tactics that’s usually involved is sinkholing. The technique, which involves pointing the infected machines to a server controlled by good guys rather than attackers, often is used as one of the last steps to take the botnet offline. But some recent work done by researchers at Damballa took a slightly different tack and used the sinkhole as a way to study a recently discovered botnet in operation, and what they found in their traffic analysis was pretty interesting.

A group of civil-liberties organizations, software companies and popular Web sites are launching a new effort called the Internet Defense League that aims to “help Internet users, organizations, and companies fight back whenever online rights are threatened.” Inspired by the collaborative fight against the SOPA bill earlier this year, the new organization counts Mozilla, the EFF, WordPress and Reddit among its charter members.

Mozilla has released Firefox 14.01, a new version of its browser which now includes encrypted Google search by default, as well as improvements to the address bar to make the identity of a site owner and the security of its connection clearer.

Dutch authorities have knocked out two of the command-and-control servers for one of the top spam-producing botnets, known as Grum. The action was not a complete knockout though, as there are still two other C&C servers at work, but researchers are optimistic that the volume of spam will drop as a result.

Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android have been on opposite ends of the security continuum for the last few years, with iOS remaining resistant to malware and Android becoming a frequent target for attackers and malware authors. Google has been taking steps to change that in recent releases, and the latest version of its mobile operating system, Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, includes several new exploit mitigations and a more extensive implementation of ASLR to help defeat many kinds of exploits.

It’s not every day that you get a security story that involves Yahoo, Google and Microsoft, but that’s what has happened with the claims from a Microsoft official that there was an Android-based botnet in existence sending spam from compromised devices. Now it seems that the spam emanating from Android phones may be the result of a bug the Yahoo Mail app that enables attackers to sniff traffic and compromise users’ accounts.

A new fork of the Black Hole exploit kit is making quick work of a recently patched Java vulnerability and security researchers say that the attackers are registering new sites quickly to exploit users with vulnerable browsers.