Spamhaus Sees Increase In Botnet Servers In 2014

The past year were more servers detected that were used by botnets to control infected computers, according to Spamhaus in a new survey published. According to the anti-spam organization comes as no surprise that there are more botnet activity was observed.

Most botnet servers are located at providers with undermanned abuse departments, inadequate abuse policy or who are not able to detect abuse on their network efficiently and fight. The areas used by cyber criminals for their botnet servers are mainly registered with registrars in countries with lax laws and enforcement against cyber crime.

Last year saw Spamhaus 7182 unique IP addresses when a botnet server was hosted. An increase of IP addresses 525 (7.88%) relative to 2013. In 48% of cases, however, it was a hacked web server. The botnet servers were hosted on different network in 1183. Most botnet servers were found in the French OVH, German and Dutch Hetzner Leaseweb. Spamhaus notes that this is just about the raw numbers and the numbers say nothing about how long a botnet server is active, or the provider responds quickly to takedown requests.

When it comes to registrars where cyber criminals domain names for their botnet server register the top 5 consists only of Russian and Chinese registrars. Furthermore, are also American registrars extended in the overview. Regarding the tld who choose the cyber criminals is most likely to domains ending in .com and .ru. Further from the survey shows that most botnet servers are used for controlling banking Trojans, Trojans that are designed to steal money from online bank accounts. 4565 servers (63.5%) were used for this type of malware.

Google - Captcha Fighter Against Robots

Google has a new captcha developed to distinguish people on websites of robots, whereby it is no longer necessary to solve a puzzle first. CAPTCHAs are used inter alia for the automatic creation of accounts and post spam on websites counter.

To often distinguishable robots people must puzzles and distorted texts are resolved. Google uses recaptcha example, where there are words from books must be retyped. Our own research shows that the search giant artificial intelligence with an accuracy of 99.8% can solve the puzzles. According to Google would therefore be much easier to apply directly to users whether they are human or robot. This allows users to quickly register or use of a service, which also eliminates the annoyance of solving the captcha.

API

A new API (Application Programming Interface) makes this captcha experience now possible. On websites that use the API receives a large number of users the ability to attach a single click that they are not a robot. Although this sounds simple, the underlying technology is complex, according to the search giant. Last year was a special backend developed that performs a risk if users want to solve a captcha.

On the basis of the way in which the user handles were examined with the captcha or the user was a human. The new API is a development of this, which is looked at many factors which indicate that it is a human being. Where does the risk of insufficient evidence to make this decision will appear captcha again. In addition, the API also makes it possible to test other types of captcha's. The new API would now be used on various websites, including Snapchat, WordPress and Humble Bundle.