Andre Yoskowitz
2 Feb 2010 12:06
According to security researcher Steven Adair, hundreds of prominent websites including those run by the CIA and FBI are currently being attacked by the Pushdo botnet, which floods the sites with junk data.
Other sites being hit include Twitter, Paypal, Google and Microsoft's homepages.
"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," says Adair. "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."
Pushdo, otherwise known as Pandex or Cutwail, had been around since 2007, and also distributes rootkits and trojans.