[ISN] Bot herders hide master control channel in Google cloud

[InfoSec News]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/09/bot_herders_coopt_google_appengine/

By Dan Goodin in San Francisco
The Register
9th November 2009

Cyber criminals' love affair with cloud computing just got steamier with 
the discovery that Google's AppEngine was tapped to act as the master 
control channel that feeds commands to large networks of infected 
computers.

The custom application was used to relay download commands to PCs that 
had already been infected and made part of a botnet, said Jose Nazario, 
the manager of security research at Arbor Networks. Google shut down the 
rogue app shortly after being notified of it.

The discovery is the latest to highlight bot herders' growing embrace of 
the cloud, in which applications and data are hosted on large, publicly 
available servers instead of stand-alone machines. Last Friday, 
researchers from Symantec found a Facebook account pumping commands to 
zombie drones. And in August, Nazario found several Twitter accounts 
that were doing much the same thing.

Also on Monday, researchers from anti-virus provider Trend Micro 
reported that the massive Koobface botnet was abusing Google Reader to 
spam malicious links to Facebook and other social networking sites.

[...]