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VIRTUALISATION Government computers caught up in monster botnet
VIRTUALISATION Government computers caught up in monster botnet | Government computers caught up in monster botnet |
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| by Davey Winder | |
| Thursday, 23 April 2009 | |
  
The BBC recently managed to build a botnet of some 22,000 of its viewers while researching the danger of malware. Meanwhile the Conficker worm continues to prompt speculation that it might carry a payload that creates the world's biggest botnet. Featured Whitepaper
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The Finjan Malicious Code Research Center has announced that there exists a 1.9 million malware-infected computer strong network hosted out of the Ukraine and incorporating corporate, consumer and worryingly many Government computers from around the world. We understand that the United Kingdom and United States top the list of countries with the most computers infected. The US has 45 percent of infected computers, followed by the UK on 6 percent, Canada and Germany on 4 percent each and France with 3 percent. The remaining 38 percent spread across the planet. Looking at the Finjan report it would appear that the botnet is under the control of a 'cybergang' comprising a total of just six crooks in all. But what a botnet they have managed to create, with the command and control servers being active since February this year. By establishing a wide-ranging affiliation network over the Web, the crooks managed to distribute their malware-install base very successfully indeed. So successful, in fact, that computers in some 77 government-owned domains around the world have been compromised. The nature of the malware is such that it can be instructed to execute almost any command on the remote computer such as reading email or copying keystrokes or sending spam to name but a few. Yuval Ben-Itzhak, CTO of Finjan, warns "the sophistication of the malware and the staggering amount of infected computers proves that cybergangs are raising the bar." Computers running Windows XP are being infected, it would appear, and unsurprisingly users of Internet Explorer are at the greatest risk (78 percent of those infected) followed by Firefox (15 percent) and Opera (3 percent) |
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