ReadWriteWeb

As anyone who has ever had a valid credit card charge questioned knows, there is a lot of fraudulent use of cards, and the Internet has made it even easier for the bad guys to exploit them. According to comScore, last year ecommerce in the U.S. reached record levels of spending with more than $160 billion in transactions. With all this activity, it is like looking for the proverbial needle in a very large haystack to try to track down fraudulent transactions. But a look into a couple of new fraud detection and prevention technologies shows that perhaps the good guys are making some inroads in this war.

Security researchers have identified the person responsible for about 22% of all spam on the Internet. Ironically, the individual responsible for running the operation through the so-called "Cutwail" botnet goes by the codename "Google." Krebs On Security cracked the case on the malicious hacker responsible for much of the spam that cripples inboxes across the Internet.

Hundreds of chat logs were discovered by investigators between "Google" and the co-founder of a spam operation called "SpamIt," Dmitry Stupin. These logs, discovered on Stupin's computer by Russian investigators, gave a detailed look into how "Google" rans Cutwail and how he built the largest spam network on the planet.

Microsoft is stepping up its action against the operators of the Rustock botnet that terrorized computers around the world for years before it was taken down in March. The software giant is offering up to $250,000 for information leading to the capture and conviction of individuals responsible for the botnet. With that type of cash as an incentive, the Rustock operators may not be able to hide for long.

The Rustock botnet was responsible for a great quantity of the world's spam during the time it was active. The operators of the botnet are wanted for various criminal activities including counterfeit advertisements and violating the trademarks of Microsoft and pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer. With Rustock out of the picture, the world's spam levels are at their lowest levels since 2008. Do you know anybody associated with Rustock and looking for a reward?

We've all heard security nerds complain about the vulnerabilities of cloud computing; here's the news they've been waiting for.

Black-hat hackers got into an unnamed website hosted on Amazon's servers then proceeded to install an illegal command and control infrastructure. Named America's number one most wanted botnet, Zeus was discovered on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) by security researchers yesterday.

New Trend: Web 2.0-controlled malware?

Security researchers at Symantec recently uncovered a backdoor trojan whose spread is being dictated by commands hosted in Google Groups, Google's online discussion forums. The backdoor trojan, named Trojan.Grups, appears to be the first ever malware to use an online newsgroup as the "command and control" center for botnet communications. It's certainly the first time that Google Groups specifically has been compromised in this way. This new discovery points to what appears to be the latest trend in what you could call "Web 2.0 malware," that is, nasty computer programs that don't just spread in social networks, but actually use the infrastructure of the social networks themselves to do the spreading.