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New Mac OS X botnet discovered, coordinates through reddit

Accepted submission by c0lo at 2014-10-03 21:35:05
Security
DrWeb, a russian security team, reports [drweb.com] it discovered a Mac botnet:

[...]a complex multi-purpose backdoor that entered the virus database as Mac.BackDoor.iWorm. Criminals can issue commands that get this program to carry out a wide range of instructions on the infected machines. A statistical analysis indicates that there are more than 17,000 unique IP addresses associated with infected Macs.

[...] It is worth mentioning that in order to acquire a control server address list, the bot uses the search service at reddit.com, and—as a search query—specifies hexadecimal values of the first 8 bytes of the MD5 hash of the current date. The reddit.com search returns a web page containing a list of botnet C&C servers and ports published by criminals in comments to the post minecraftserverlists under the account vtnhiaovyd.

Information collected by Doctor Web's researchers shows that as of September 26, 2014, 17,658 IP addresses of infected devices were involved in the botnet created by hackers using Mac.BackDoor.iWorm. Most of them—4,610 (representing 26.1% of the total)—reside in the United States. Canada ranks second with 1,235 addresses (7%), and the United Kingdom ranks third with 1,227 IP addresses of infected computers (6.9% of the total).


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