FBI makes arrests in botnet case

SC Magazine reports that the FBI has arrested or charged three men in connection with a botnet believed to comprise more than a million zombie computers.

Named are: James C. Brewer of Arlington, Texas, Jason Michael Downey of Covington, Ky, and — wait for it — Robert Alan Soloway, the spammer who was already arrested a few weeks ago on various charges running from fraud to money laundering.

The botnet in question was used for both spamming and executing DDoS attacks. It's not yet clear if this is the botnet involved in the recent attack against various anti-spam services.

Spamhaus, URIBL, SURBL under DDOS attack

This has been ongoing for a couple of days now. Spamhaus and two other major blocking list providers have been under a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack. Steve Linford of Spamhaus believes that the source of the attack is the same people who executed the attack against Blue Security last year which effectively destroyed their Blue Frog anti-spam project.

Spamhaus has implemented anti-DDOS countermeasures and is weathering the storm. Uribl has closed up shop, redirecting their IP address to 127.0.0.1 until things blow over. (One wag has suggested that they redirect to 255.255.255.255 in order to get the attention of the ISPs hosting the zombies. Bit of network geek humor there.)

More information can be found in Linford's announcement on usenet news.