'Iranian Cyber Army' Enters the Mercenary Business with Botnets

(Oct. 25) -- The Iranian Cyber Army, a group of hackers with suspected links to Iran's Revolutionary Guards, is reportedly getting into the mercenary business. The group, which hacked into Twitter and Chinese search engine Baidu in December and TechCrunch's European website last month, appears to be selling its services on the cyber black market by renting access to its botnet.

What's a botnet you say? A botnet is a network of computers that are being controlled by one source, called the administrator, often for malicious purposes and often because the administrator has installed malware on them. The computers are known as zombies because they can then be used to launch attacks on other computer systems, though their actual owners generally do not know they have been compromised.

Researchers at cyber security company Seculert investigating the previous Iranian Cyber Army attacks discovered a user interface that allows outside parties to rent access to the botnet, PC World reports. Customers can give the group malware they want installed and tell them which machines they want to access and, for a fee, the group will perform their attack through its botnet.

Seculert has notified the provider of the page where the site is hosted and has also contacted law enforcement. They believe that as many as 20 million computers may have already been infected by the hackers.

The company traced the botnet to the Iranian Cyber Army because an e-mail address on the administrator site is the same as the e-mail address posted in the other attacks. "Iranian.Cyber.Army@gmail.com" was prominently displayed on the website (see a picture of it at Seculert's blog) and the name "Iranian Cyber Army" was embedded in the HTML code for the site's statistics.

Read more at PCWorld.

Follow Surge Desk on Twitter.