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.
