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The Kraken (a 19th century word referring to a giant squid) is a huge network of personal computers that have been infected with software that turns them into zombie systems under the control of a master program - a botnet. The Kraken botnet is used by criminals to generate spam.
Kelly Jackson Higgins, writing for DarkReading, says, "like Storm, Kraken so far is mostly being used for spamming the usual scams - high interest loans, gambling, male enhancement products, pharmacy advertisements, and counterfeit watches, for instance."
The botnet is the largest known; in April 2008 it was estimated to have included 400,000 zombies.
Gregg Keizer of Computerworld reports that in April 2008, TippingPoint researchers Pedram Amini and Cody Pierce "created a fake Kraken command-and-control server by reverse engineering the list of domain names found in a captured sample of the bot, and then registered some of the sub-domains Kraken looks for. The server essentially acted as a command-and-control honeypot that waited for...