Botnet attacks the CIA website
February 3rd, 2010 - 2:11 am ICT by Aishwarya BhattWashington DC, Feb 2 (THAINDIAN NEWS) Many websites like the CIA and the FBI are facing the brunt of a botnet attack, in which they get flooded with junk data. This is not the first time that important websites have faced the brunt of the botnet attacks. Other noticeable victims include Microsoft, Google, Twitter and PayPal.
Security researcher Steven Adair says that the culprit is the Pushdo botnet in this particular case. “It seems the Pushdo botnet recently made changes to its code to cause infected nodes to create junk SSL connections to approximately 315 different websites. The bots seem to start to initiate an SSL connection and a bit of junk to the websites and then disconnect. They do not actually request an resources from the website or do anything else other than repeat the cycle periodically.”
Though the attack is said to not be very deadly, yet small-scale website would slow down as a result of the botnet attack. They could even fail in some cases. Pushdo is also known as Pandex and even as Cutwail and it has been up to mischief since 2007.
Botnet is a collective term for a collection of software robots, or bots, that run autonomously and automatically. Botnet is often linked with malicious software, but in some cases it can also refer to the network of computers using distributed computing software.
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Tags: adair, botnet, brunt, cia website, collective term, computing software, culprit, cutwail, fbi, feb 2, google, junk data, malicious software, mischief, pandex, paypal, researcher, software robots, ssl connection, twitter