Botnet Wars Have Escalated
The "botnet cold war" has escalated into a shooting war, with the lastest variants either uninstalling or attacking each other.
Enter the propagators of a piece of malware Symantec dubs Trojan.Srizbi, one of a handful programs spread by the MPack attack kit. A trojan that makes infected computers part of a botnet that churns out spam, Srizbi is also known to uninstall competing spam malware being spread by another nasty piece of malware dubbed the Storm Worm.
"The Storm Worm criminals appear to have taken exception to that," says Lawrence Baldwin, a malware researcher who has recently observed Storm zombies DDoSing the server Srizbi uses to download installation files. Baldwin is unable to estimate how much traffic the Storm bots are sending to the Srizbi server, but he says attempts to get an infected machine in his lab to update the Storm malware makes him believe the attack is significant.
Are these attacks out of rivalry or personal disagreements or is it all profit motivated as there are less systems to infect?
[Rival malware gangs wage turf war]
