In a twist on distributed denial-of-service attacks, cybercriminals are using DNS servers–the phonebooks of the Internet–to amplify their assaults and disrupt online business.

In this new kind of attack, an assailant would typically use a botnet to send a large number of queries to open DNS servers. These queries will be “spoofed” to look like they come from the target of the flooding, and the DNS server will reply to that network address.

Using DNS servers to do their dirty work offers key benefits to attackers. It hides their systems, making it harder for the victim to find the original source of the attack. But more important, reflecting an attack through a DNS server also allows the assault to be amplified, delivering a larger amount of malicious traffic to the target.

In February, Smirnov saw the dealer selling CDs with his company’s software at a computer market without a license. Smirnov demanded that the dealer stop the illegal sale. A scuffle broke out, but they were stopped by the guard. After that, the pirate expressed a wish to continue the fight in the street, but Smirnov suggested a fitness center.

He defeated the computer pirate 24-16 in three rounds, lasting three minutes each.

Source: mosnews.com

Federal Election Commission proposed new rules Friday that would leave almost all Internet political activity unregulated. The proposal would, however, require paid advertisements for federal candidates on the Internet to be paid for with money regulated by federal campaign law.

The FEC said the rules “are intended to ensure that political committees properly finance and disclose their Internet communications, without impeding individual citizens from using the Internet to speak freely regarding candidates and elections.”

Source: AP

Walt Disney Co.’s Buena Vista Games Inc. said on Friday it plans to release a PC video game based on the wildly popular television show “Desperate Housewives” this fall.

In the game, players take on the role of a new housewife who can uncover or create new scandals on Wisteria Lane, the seemingly perfect street where the show takes place.

Source: Reuters

A do-it-yourself malware creation kit is being hawked on a Russian Web site for less than $20, according to security researchers tracking the seedier side of the Internet.

Virus hunters at SophosLabs discovered the spyware kit, called WebAttacker, on a Web site run by self-professed spyware and adware developers. The kit is available for sale directly from the site, which even offers tech support to buyers.

The WebAttacker kit includes scripts that simplify the task of infecting computers and spam-sending techniques to lure victims to specially rigged Web sites.

Source: eWeek

Apple Computer founder and CEO Steve Jobs sold 45 per cent of his Apple stock this week. Jobs sold 4.57m shares at a price of $64.66, netting him a cool $295m.

Jobs was granted the 10m shares in 2003, but they didn’t vest until now.

Source: The Register

The first wave of zero-day attacks against an unpatched flaw in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser has begun and security experts warn that the threat will grow significantly over the weekend.

Less than 24 hours after Microsoft issued an advisory with interim workarounds for IE users, malware hunters have started detecting drive-by downloads on more than 20 maliciously rigged Web sites.

eWEEK has seen a list of more than 20 unique domains and 100 unique URLs hosting the exploits, which are dropping a variant of SDbot, a dangerous family of backdoors that give hackers complete ownership of infected computers.

Source: eWeek

Spam king and online drugstore operator Christopher William Smith, aka Rizler, 26, who is awaiting trial at the Sherburne County Jail, Elk River, Minn., used his phone privileges to arrange a hit on a witness and the witness’ family.

According to the indictment, Smith called an acquaintance from jail March 4 and allegedly stated he intended to threaten and intimidate a witness he expected would testify against him in his upcoming trial on drug and other charges. The indictment alleges Smith also said he intended to have the witness or the witness’ family killed.

Source: spamdailynews.com

Inspired by projects that harness spare time on PCs, one programmer wants to hand back control of internet searching to users.

Your home PC is clearly no match for Google’s thousands of servers crawling the web. For example, you cannot crawl more than 1m pages a day on a 2Mbps broadband connection. It will take you 8,000 days (about 22 years) to acquire a Google-sized but hopelessly out-of-date index.

The solution? Recruit like-minded people who donate computer time, as they do for Seti@home and other projects. “Google’s database is about 8bn pages, so fewer than 10,000 people taking part in this project can recrawl the whole of Google’s database every single day,” says Chudnovsky.

Majestic-12’s volunteers - 60 so far - are crawling about 50m pages a day using unlimited broadband connections and software that runs in the background. Over the past few months, 7bn pages have been crawled although, at 1bn pages, the completed index lags behind for now. This is stored centrally to enable the Majestic-12 distributed search engine to return fast, relevant results.

Source: guardian