[Full-disclosure] A Closer Look at the Twitter-Controlled Botnet

["my.hndl" <my.hndl@xxxxxxxxx>]

Wired recently reported (
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/08/botnet-tweets/) on a botnet that
was being administered via Twitter and other social networking sites.  This
is not a new idea, in fact there's a proof-of-concept framework to do
exactly that (http://www.digininja.org/projects/kreiosc2.php).  What's
interesting about the Wired article is that the author made no effort to
obscure the details of the C&C commands.

I took a closer look at some payloads being deployed to this live botnet and
wrote a post detailing how I decoded the tweets, following their links, got
the malware, figured out what to do with it and determined how well
anti-virus detected the malware (spoiler: not very well).  During the
research I found malware hosted on Ubuntu.com.  The post is written as kind
of a how-to for people curious about following botnets and analyzing
malware.  I have another post planned in which I will disassemble and debug
the malware. Intended for novice malware analysts.

Read more here:
http://paulmakowski.wordpress.com/2009/08/16/a-closer-look-at-the-twitter-controlled-botnet-part-1/

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