Look Ma, I created a botnet!

"The abstract concepts of "botnet" and "Trojan" just became a lot more concrete for me.

In less than an hour on Thursday, I was able to use programs readily available on the Internet underground for as little as $300 to infect several Windows clients and take complete control of them in a test environment.

In contrast to the real world, the McAfee Malware Experience event, which was akin to a Malware 101 class (or, in my case, Malware for Dummies), served up printed step-by-step instructions for us nonhacker journalists. But McAfee researchers said the programs used--real samples of malicious code from the wild--were not particularly sophisticated and any script kiddie could manage them easily."

Read the full story by Elinor Mills

New worm can infect home modem/routers

"A new botnet, “psyb0t” is the first known to be capable of directly infecting home routers and cable/DSL modems.

The malware contains the shellcode for over 30 different Linksys models, 10 Netgear models, and a variety of other cable and DSL modems (15 different shellcodes).

A list of 6000 usernames and 13,000 passwords were also included, to be used for brute force entry to Telnet and SSH logins which are open to the LAN and sometimes even the public WAN side of the routers. Generally, routers do not lock a user out after a number of incorrect password attempts, making brute force attacks possible."

Read the full article here