News: Rise of Kraken

The Kraken botnet, believed by many to be the single biggest zombie network until it was dismantled last year, is staging a comeback that has claimed almost 320,000 PCs, a security researcher said.

Since April, this son-of-Kraken botnet has infected an estimated 318,058 machines - about half as big as the original Kraken was at its height in the middle of 2008, according to Paul Royal, a research scientist at the Georgia Tech Information Security Center.

Like its predecessor, the new botnet is a prodigious generator of spam, with a single machine with average bandwidth able to send more than 600,000 junk mails per day.

Curiously, the malware spawning the new zombie network is being spread by a separate botnet that uses the Butterfly framework, a for-hire software kit for infecting Windows PCs. The collaboration between operators of the two networks is generating some head-scratching among researchers.

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