Researchers have made a huge dent in a major variant of the Pushdo botnet, virtually crippling the network by working with hosting providers to take down about two thirds of the command-and-control servers involved in the botnet.

Pushdo for years has been one of the major producers of spam and other malicious activity, and researchers have been monitoring the botnet and looking for ways to do some damage to it since at least 2007. Now, researchers at Last Line of Defense, a security intelligence firm, have made some serious progress in crushing the botnet’s spam operations.

After doing an analysis of Pushdo’s command-and-control infrastructure, the researchers identified about 30 servers that were serving as C&C machines for a variant of the botnet. Working with the hosting providers who maintained the servers in question, the LLOD researchers were able to get 20 of the C&C servers taken offline, the company said.

Recommended Reads

• Researchers Cripple Pushdo Botnet
• New Storm Botnet Variant Making Spam
• Where Are We A Year After McColo Shutdown?

“We identified a total of 30 servers used as part of the Pushdo/Cutwail infrastructure, located at eight different hosting providers all over the world. The information about the activity was extracted from Anubisreports, which contain details about the system and network activities, including a pcap file that contains the network traffic we observed while doing the analysis. We contacted all hosting providers and worked with them on taking down the machines, which lead to the take-down of almost 20 servers. Unfortunately, not all providers were responsive and thus several Command & Control servers are still online at this point,” researcher Thorsten Holz wrote.

The result is that the volume of spam that Pushdo is producing has dropped to nearly zero.

At the time of Pushdo’s appearance several years ago, researchers found evidence that Pushdo’s creators had gone to some lengths to avoid detection and prevent removal of the malware associated withthe botnet. The creators had changed the way that Pushdo made HTTP requests, creating overly long GET requests to make them less identifiable.

“The length of the request will likely change between different service pack levels of Windows. IDS/IPS signatures can still be written around such a request, taking advantage of the fact that no other HTTP headers are sent as one characteristic to key in on. However, even with this approach, false positives may still occur,” SecureWorks researcher Joe Stewart wrote in an analysis in 2007. “Clearly the author of Pushdo is intent on evading detection for as long as possible, in order to have the maximum amount of time to seed Cutwail spambots into the wild.”

One of the interesting aspects of the original version of Pushdo is that its creator was using it not just to send spam, but also to spread other pieces of malware. This has become a more common business model in recent years as bot herders have looked for new ways to make money from the millions of compromised PCs under their control.

The original post is available at ThreatPost

Spam volume graph from M86 Security Labs.

— Original Article —

More than 40 percent of the world’s spam is coming from a single network of computers that computer security experts continue to battle, according to new statistics from Symantec’s Message Labs division.

The Rustock botnet has shrunk since April, when about 2.5 million computers were infected with its malicious software that sent about 43 billion spam e-mails per day. Much of it is pharmaceutical spam.

Now, about 1.3 million computers are infected with Rustock, and the botnet is making up for its decreased size with increased volume, said Paul Wood, a MessageLabs intelligence analyst with Symantec. Those infected computers — most of which are in North America and Western Europe — are collectively sending around 46 billion spam e-mails per day.

The reason for the drop in infected computers could be due to a number of factors, Wood said. Those computers’ antivirus programs may have detected the infections or the people controlling Rustock could have lost the connection to those computers for various reasons.

The computers infected with Rustock have also stopped using TLS (Transport Layer Security), an encryption protocol used to securely send e-mail. Spammers were believed to encrypt their spam using TLS because it was harder for other network equipment to inspect the traffic and figure out if it was spam, Wood said.

But sending e-mail using TLS required more resources and was slower. “It would seem that the botnet controllers, especially those behind Rustock, have perhaps realized that the use of TLS gave them little or no discernible benefits and instead impeded their sending capacity owing to the additional bandwidth and processing overhead needed for TLS,” the report said.

Rustock has proved to be a robust botnet. It was nearly killed off when McColo, an ISP in San Jose, California, was cut off from the Internet in November 2008 by its upstream providers. McColo had hosted the command-and-control servers for several botnets, including Rustock.

But Rustock’s operators were able to switch the command-and-control servers when McColo briefly regained connectivity again before finally being shut off, which has allowed it to run for nearly four years now.

View the original story here.

—–

Spammers know that if they include a direct link to their site that their spam messages will not go through so they use URL shortening services to redirect you to their site if you click on the link in the spam message.

Multi-level Intent Analysis checks if the URL in the e-mail message redirects to a spammer website so the URL shortened version of the spam is blocked as efficiently as if the spam link was directly in the message.

- Shaun

Some Information from Barracuda Networks

Hiding Behind the “Good Guy”

By registering new domains or by redirecting to spam Web domains through reputable blogs, free Web site providers, or URL redirection services, spammers have also learned to hide their identity from traditional reputation checks that profile spam Web domains.

Illustrations D and E below show two separate spamming campaigns that were recently detected by Barracuda Central in which the spammers attempt to hide their identity by using URLs referencing reputable Web domains, Geocities and Blogspot. Often these URLs contain either redirections or simple Web links to known spammer Web sites.

Illustration D: Geocities redirect to sexdatesearch.com – known spammer

Illustration E: Blogspot redirect to known spammer IP (211.93.46.38)

Despite these attempts to hide behind a “good” identity, the Barracuda Spam & Virus Firewall profiled this campaign behavior of placing redirections or Web links to known spam
sites behind popular Web providers. The Barracuda Spam & Virus Firewall was able to block these messages through Multi-level Intent Analysis by following the embedded URLs as a Web browser would and inspecting the resulting contents.

Sample Behaviors and Countermeasures

When spammers obfuscate their identities, the Barracuda Spam & Virus Firewall can use Predictive Sender Profiling to identify behaviors of all senders and apply the applicable Barracuda Spam & Virus Firewall defense tactic.

At the Federal Trade Commission’s request, a district court judge has permanently shut down a rogue Internet Service Provider that recruited, hosted, and actively participated in the distribution of spam, spyware, child pornography, and other malicious and illegal content. The ISP’s computer servers and other assets have been seized and will be sold by a court-appointed receiver, and the operation has been ordered to turn over $1.08 million in ill-gotten gains to the FTC.

In June 2009, the FTC charged that 3FN, which does business under a variety of names, actively recruited and colluded with criminals to distribute harmful electronic content including spyware, viruses, trojan horses, phishing schemes, botnet command-and-control servers, and pornography featuring children, violence, bestiality, and incest. The FTC alleged that the defendant advertised its services in the darkest corners of the Internet, including a chat room for spammers.

The FTC complaint alleged that 3FN actively shielded its criminal clientele by either ignoring take-down requests issued by the online security community, or shifting its criminal elements to other Internet protocol addresses it controlled to evade detection.

The FTC also alleged that 3FN deployed and operated botnets – large networks of computers that have been compromised and enslaved by the originator of the botnet, known as a “bot herder.” Botnets can be used for a variety of illicit purposes, including sending spam and launching denial-of- service attacks. According to the FTC, the defendant recruited bot herders and hosted the command-and-control servers – the computers that relay commands from the bot herders to the compromised computers known as “zombie drones.”

—

An excerpt from an interesting announcement by the Federal Trade Commission – taking action against a notorioius Internet Service Provider. (* from the FTC Website – original post here).

The Article:

Consumers Don’t Relate Bot Infections to Risky Behavior As Millions Continue to Click on Spam

San Francisco, March 24, 2010 –A significant percentage of consumers continue to interact with spam despite their awareness of how bots and viruses spread through risky email behavior, according to the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) based on a new survey it released today covering North America and Western Europe. Even though over eighty percent of email users are aware of the existence of bots, tens of millions respond to spam in ways that could leave them vulnerable to a malware infection, according to the 2010 MAAWG Email Security Awareness and Usage Survey.

In the new survey, half of users said they had opened spam, clicked on a link in spam, opened a spam attachment, replied or forwarded it – activities that leave consumers susceptible to fraud, phishing, identity theft and infection. While most consumers said they were aware of the existence of bots, only one-third believed they were vulnerable to an infection. “Consumers need to understand they are not powerless bystanders.

They can play a key role in standing up to spammers by not engaging and just marking their emails as junk,” said Michael O’Reirdan, MAAWG chairman. “When consumers respond to spam or click on links in junk mail, they often set themselves up for fraud or to have their computers compromised by criminals who use them to deliver more spam, spread viruses and launch cyber attacks,” O’Reirdan said. The research findings on awareness of bots, email security practices, and attitudes toward controlling spam were generally consistent with the first MAAWG consumer survey in 2009 covering North America.

The new 2010 survey was expanded to cover Western Europe and looks at consumers’ attitudes in Canada, France, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. It Won’t Happen to Me Syndrome Less than half of the consumers surveyed saw themselves as the entity who should be most responsible for stopping the spread of viruses. Yet, only 36% of consumers believe they might get a virus and 46% of those who opened spam did so intentionally. This is a problem because spam is one of the most common vehicles for spreading bots and viruses. The malware is often unknowingly installed on users’ computers when they open an attachment in a junk email or click on a link that takes them to a poisoned Web site, according to O’Reirdan. Younger consumers tend to consider themselves more security savvy, possibly from having grown up with the Internet, yet they also take more risks. Among the survey’s key findings:

• Almost half of those who opened spam did so intentionally. Many wanted to unsubscribe or complain to the sender (25%), to see what would happen (18%) or were interested in the product (15%).
• Overall, 11% of consumers have clicked on a link in spam, 8% have opened attachments, 4% have forwarded it and 4% have replied to spam.
• On average, 44% of users consider themselves “somewhat experienced” with email security. In Germany, 33% of users see themselves as “expert” or “very experienced,” followed by around 20% in Spain, the U.K. and the U.S.A., 16% in Canada and just 8% in France.
• Men and email users under 35 years, the same demographic groups who tend to consider themselves more experienced with email security, are more likely to open or click on links or forward spam. Among email users under 35 years, 50% report having opened spam compared to 38% of those over 35. Younger users also were more likely to have clicked on a link in spam (13%) compared to less than 10% of older consumers.
• Consumers are most likely to hold their Internet or email service provider most responsible for stopping viruses and malware. Only 48% see themselves as most responsible, though in France this falls to 30% and 37% in Spain.
• Yet in terms of anti-virus effectiveness, consumers ranked themselves ahead of all others, except for anti-virus vendors: 56% of consumers rated their own ability to stop malware and 67% rated that of anti-virus vendors’ as very or fairly good. Government agencies, consumer advocacy agencies and social networking sites were among those rated most poorly.

It Won’t Happen to Me Syndrome

Less than half of the consumers surveyed saw themselves as the entity who should be most responsible for stopping the spread of viruses. Yet, only 36% of consumers believe they might get a virus and 46% of those who opened spam did so intentionally.

This is a problem because spam is one of the most common vehicles for spreading bots and viruses. The malware is often unknowingly installed on users’ computers when they open an attachment in a junk email or click on a link that takes them to a poisoned Web site, according to O’Reirdan.

Younger consumers tend to consider themselves more security savvy, possibly from having grown up with the Internet, yet they also take more risks. Among the survey’s key findings:

The survey was conducted online between January 8 and 21, 2010 among over a thousand email users in the United States and over 500 email users in each of the other five countries. Participants were general consumers responsible for managing the security for their personal email address.

Both the survey’s key findings and the full report are available at the MAAWG Web site, www.MAAWG.org. The 2010 research was conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs, and the full report includes country comparisons for many of the questions along with detailed charts.

About the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG)
The Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) is where the messaging industry comes together to work against spam, viruses, denial-of-service attacks and other online exploitation. MAAWG (www.MAAWG.org) represents almost one billion mailboxes from some of the largest network operators worldwide. It is the only organization addressing messaging abuse holistically by systematically engaging all aspects of the problem, including technology, industry collaboration and public policy. MAAWG leverages the depth and experience of its global membership to tackle abuse on existing networks and new emerging services. Headquartered in San Francisco, Calif., MAAWG is an open forum driven by market needs and supported by major network operators and messaging providers.

You can also read the original post at MAAWG (Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group)

• Date: February 25th, 2010
• Author: Michael Kassner

Latest reports have spam accounting for more than 95 percent of all email messages. You can thank botnets for most of that. Here’s what we’re up against.

While doing research for this project, I came across a blog series (first,
second, download that includes a PDF version and a PowerPoint presentation.

1: Grum (Tedroo)

Grum is the future for spam botnets. It’s a kernel-mode rootkit and thus hard to detect. It’s also sneaky, infecting files used by Autorun registries. That guarantees it will be activated. This botnet is of special interest to researchers. It’s relatively small, only 600,000 members. Yet it accounts for almost 25 percent, or 40 billion spam-emails a day.

Grum focuses on pharmaceutical spam. You know the kind. There must be money in this, as most spam botnets are involved with it to some degree.

2: Bobax (Kraken/Oderoor/Hacktool.spammer)

Bobax confuses botnet hunters, being somewhat related to the Kraken botnet. Recently, Bobax went through a rewrite. The authors converted command and control traffic to HTTP, making it more difficult to block and trace.

Right now, Bobax has only 100,000 members, yet it produces 27 billion spam messages a day. That’s 15 percent. Or more impressively, 1,400 spam email messages per bot per minute. Bobax appears to be a botnet for hire, as the type of spam varies.

3: Pushdo (Cutwail/Pandex)

Pushdo started at the same time asStorm, in 2007. Storm is all but gone. But Pushdo is still going strong, sending out approximately 19 billion spam email messages a day from one and a half million bots. Pushdo is thedownloader, which gains access to the victim computer. It then downloads Cutwail, the spamming software.

The Pushdo/Cutwail botnet spews spam with a wide variety of subject matter, including pharmaceuticals, online casinos, phishing schemes, and links to malware-laced Web sites.

4: Rustock (Costrat)

Rustock is another survivor. It was almost destroyed when
McColo was shuttered in 2008. But it’s back and currently the largest botnet, with almost two million bots. Before McColo, Rustock’s trademark was to generate huge amounts of spam, then go dormant for several months. Today, Rustock’s signature is to deliver spam only from 3 a.m. to 7 a.m. EST (GM-5) daily.

Rustock is also known for forging legitimate email newsletters using image files.Image spam is undetectable by most filtering software. In addition, Rustock does the usual pharmaceutical and Twitter-based spam to the tune of 17 billion spam messages a day.

5: Bagle (Beagle/Mitglieder/Lodeight)

Bagle
is an interesting botnet because of its industrious author. Since 2004, it has gone through hundreds of iterations. Two years ago, the developer decided to start making money, using Bagle to cultivate and sell email address databases.

Now, Bagle bots act as relay proxies, forwarding spam email messages to their final destination. Bagle has at most 500,000 bots, but it still moves 14 billion pieces of spam each day.

6: Mega-D (Ozdok)

Mega-D is famous — or infamous, depending on your point of view. In November 2009, researchers at FireEye were able to shut the botnet down by registering its command and control domains ahead of the botmasters. But the malware is programmed to constantly generate new domains, allowing the botmasters to eventually regain control.

Of the top 10 botnets, Mega-D is the smallest, consisting of 50,000 members. That’s not very many, considering it pushes out 11 billion pieces of spam daily. It’s second only to Bobax, when considering spam per bot per minute. Mega-D’s spam consists of advertisements for an online pharmacy and, of course, male-enhancement drugs.

7: Maazben

Maazben has been around only since June 2009. Yet it’s of special interest to researchers. Maazben is the first botnet that can use either proxy-based or template-based bots. Spammers prefer proxy-based bots because the spam source remains hidden. But proxy-based bots don’t work if the infected computer is behind a NAT device.

The new technique must be working. Maazben is the fastest-growing botnet of the top 10, increasing membership five percent in one month. With 300,000 bots, Maazben spreads two and a half billion casino-related spam messages per day.

8: Xarvester (Rlsloup/Pixoliz)

Xarvester came into the picture after the McColo shutdown. Researchers feel the Xarvester botnet picked up a few customers from the closure. Researchers also see many similarities between Xarvester and the infamous Srizbi botnet, one of the botnets affected by the closing of the McColo data center.

Currently, the Xarvester botnet contains 60,000 members, sending out approximately two and a half billion spam messages a day. The email messages could contain spam for pharmaceuticals, fake diplomas, replica watches, and Russian-specific spam.

9: Donbot (Buzus)

The Donbot botnet is unique. It is one of the first botnets to useURL shortening, in an attempt to hide malicious links in the spam email. The thought is to increase the likelihood of someone clicking on the link. Donbot also seems to be divided into multiple individually run networks, each one pushing different types of spam.

Donbot has 100,000 members and sends out about 800 million spam emails a day. Spam content varies from weight loss drugs to stock pump-and-dump to debt settlement offers.

10: Gheg (Tofsee/Mondera)

Three things stand out about the number 10 botnet. First, almost 85 percent of the spam from it originates in South Korea. Second,Gheg is one of the few botnets that encrypt traffic from the command and control servers using a nonstandard SSL connection on port 443.

Third, Gheg has options in how it sends spam email. It can act as a conventional proxy spambot. Or it can route spam messages through the victim’s Internet provider’s mail server. Gheg has 60,000 members and pushes out about 400 million spam emails daily, concentrating on pharmaceutical spam.

Grand total

Daren Lewis of Symantec keeps tabs on many of the botnets for MessageLabs and has come up with some startling numbers. Here are the overall statistics:

• 80 percent of all spam is sent by these 10 botnets.
• These 10 botnets send 135 billion spam messages a day.
• Five million computers belong to the 10 botnets.

The statistics are probably worse now, as I do not see any reduction in any of the spam filtering houses.

Final thoughts

Well, there you have it. I wouldn’t get rid of spam filtering devices or services just yet. To make matters worse, I keep close tabs on anti-spam research and do not see any solutions in the near future.

[UPDATE]: I just received an email from MessageLabs. The research arm of Symantec released the February 2010 Intelligence Report, and it’s full of valuable information. I thought it would be a good idea to share the link and mention some of the highlights.

The paper pointed out that Grum and Rustock are the current heavyweights, accounting for 32 percent of all spam delivered. The following figure (courtesy of MessageLabs) shows the output from the 10 most active spam-sending botnets. That’s a lot of green (Rustock) and purple (Grum).

You can view the original posts here.

original post:

In part 1 of my series, I looked at which botnet sends the most spam, by total number of messages sent at the recipient level and not the envelope level. In part 2, I looked at which one sends the most spam by total amount of bytes that they emit. Now, I’d like to put it all together; if we normalize the values, which botnet is responsible for sending out the most spam on a daily basis? Depending on how we measure it, there are a couple of answers.

To check this, first I took a look at the average number of message envelopes each botnet sends per day. I then normalized the value and used the lowest sending botnet as a base, assigning it a value of 1. I have removed lethic from this count because it seems to have fallen off the radar (is something wrong with my script?). The table is below:

Looking at this table here, sorting by the average amount of total envelopes each botnet sends per day, it isn’t even close (for the month of January). Rustock, by far, sends more individual spam messages than any other botnet by a factor of 10. Its net is so wide and the other botnets aren’t even in the running. Mega-d is next followed by cutwail2.

But if we measure the amount of bandwidth the individual receiving mail servers have to process, the numbers change. If we take the average number of messages/envelope, multiple by the average message size (kb) and multiple by the average number of message envelopes per day, then we get the total amount of traffic, in bytes, that each botnet sends. Doing this, the numbers change (remember that these are normalized values, not absolute values):

Looking at it this way, the worst botnet is cutwail followed by cutwail2. Rustock drops down to 3rd in the list, a distant 3rd but not far behind cutwail1. The other botnets bring up the rear, only looking out into the distance and wishing they were as cool as the others.

So there you have it, my study on which botnet sends out the most spam. I’ve shown my work and therefore these results should be reproducible in the future. I’m not totally convinced that my scripts are completely accurate and capturing all of the required information, however, as time passes I should be able to refine them and provide an even more accurate analysis on which botnet is the worst.

You can view the original post here.

original post:

Following up from my previous post, there are a couple of ways to measure which botnet sends the most spam. On the one hand, botnets can send 1 spam message but address it to a lot of different recipients, thus putting the cost of delivery heavily onto the recipient. This means that the spammer can have a small amount of nodes and the recipient has to assume the overhead of splitting the message up and delivery to multiple recipients. On the other hand, a botnet can be very wide and send a lot of messages to a lot of different people, but only address each message to one recipient. In this case, the overhead of delivery is shifted onto the sender since the spammer/botnet has to support and maintain a lot of different nodes.

But the total number of messages is only one way of looking at it. What about the total size of the message? If one botnet sends a 10 messages at 30 kb each, and other sends 100 messages at 3 kb each, the way we measure who sends the most spam varies. They are each sending the same amount of data. Regarding the 10 botnets I have been tracking this month, below is the botnet and the average size per message in kb that they send:

From here, we can see that cutwail1/2 send very large messages, and combining that with my previous post, we can see that they send a lot of messages per email envelope and the messages tend to be quite large. Cutwail imposes a very large strain onto the overall Internet infrastructure. Rustock, conversely, remains very hard to detect in terms of its footprint. It sends on average 1 message per email envelope, and these messages are quite small.

Lethic sends lots of messages per email, but the messages are small. Gheg doesn’t send very email emails per envelope either, but its messages tend to be larger.

So, what can we conclude from these figures? Rustock is a very efficient spammer, and cutwail is very inefficient (where efficiency is defined as how easy they hide themselves and the costs they impose on the recipient). Lethic is a new kid on the block but doesn’t impose large bandwidth costs, while the others are a mixture between the rustock/cutwail contrast.

Of course, can I definitively state which botnet sends the most spam? The answer is that it depends. While the Holy Grail of many businesses is that the more data you have, the better, I have found that this is not the case. Often times, more data only serves to make you more confused and unable to give a straight up answer.

You can view the original post here.

original post:

Around the Internet, and even on this blog, various analyses have been done on botnets and which one is responsible for sending the most spam. Whether it’s Rustock, Cutwail, or one of the new kids on the block (grum, gheg, or donbot), I don’t really see any consensus on which one is the spammiest.

There are a couple of ways to measure which botnet sends the most spam. You could do it by which one is sending spam from the most distinct IPs. You could also do it by which one sends the most amount of messages. But the most amount of messages has a couple of different ways of measuring it – by total number of envelopes, total number of messages, and total number of bytes.

The envelope level is different from the message level. For you see, a message envelope can have multiple messages. A message might be addressed to multiple recipients, in other words:

From: Guy Incognito
To: Frank Grimes, Lenny Leonard, Carl Carlson

This particular email would be one envelope and three messages, because the message has to get delivered to 3 people. So, at the message level, it is more costly to process a message with multiple recipients. You could scan the message before branching it out, but afterwards when it comes time to deliver the message, you would have to fork it out into each individual messages, and each of these messages costs bandwidth and storage.

At the message level, here are 10 botnets that I have been tracking for around a month along with the average number of recipients per message:

From this perspective, cutwail and lethic are the spammiest botnets. They send spam messages to lots of different recipients which results in higher infrastructure costs for the recipient (not to mention the filterer of the spam). Lethic is a fairly new botnet, I don’t have a lot of stats for it before November 2009. I wonder whether or not it is related to cutwail1/2 at all, seeing as how the behavior is so similar. I’d have to dig into our logs and see what the messages look like in order to see if there are enough similarities.

Rustock is way down the list. Rustock is a very clever botnet, contrasting it from cutwail1/2 and lethic. Rustock’s strategy is to have a botnet base a mile wide and an inch deep. In other words, the number of distinct IPs is far higher in Rustock than any other botnet (it isn’t even close). But the number of messages it sends per envelope is small, approaching 1.0. This allows it to have a wider footprint that is harder to detect. A bursty emission of spam from a small number of IPs is easier to detect than a scattered distribution of it coming from many, many more IPs. On the other hand, while the latter is harder to detect, the former does more damage to a network because of the additional load put onto a network during the peak traffic times.

The original post from Wednesday, February 03, 2010 can be viewed here

Note: We’re following various posts by different authors on this subject so keep checking back for more information.

Here’s a story from the Register about how modern spam filtering has forced a long-time Canadian publication to have to change it’s name.  It’s a good thing that Barracuda Spam & Virus Firewalls are easy to tweak and adjust!

Spam filters stuff Canadian Beaver

Venerable magazine to adopt less suggestive title

By Lester Haines

Posted on theRegister.co.uk 13th January 2010 14:41 GMT

Publisher Deborah Morrison explained to AFP: “The Beaver was an impediment online. Several readers asked us to change the title because their spam filters at home or at work were blocking it. I’ve even had emails bounce back because I had inadvertently typed the term in the heading."

She added: “Nearly a century ago, it probably seemed the perfect name for a magazine about the fur trade and Canada’s northwest frontier. There was only one interpretation for the word then. But you’re likely to find a lot of [porn] sites now if you search for the title of our history magazine online.”

The 90-year-old title will, after the Feb/March issue, be known as Canada’s History.

Other Beavers of note which can be found online are the newspaper of the London School of Economics Students’ Union, a Toronto restaurant offering a range of tongue-tingling delights and a film starring Mel Gibson and Jodie Foster. ®

The original story from TheRegister.