‘Zombie’ PC Plague Hits Internet Hard
Summer 2008 has seen a huge increase in the amount of hijacked home computers, known as “zombies”, experts say.
The Shadowserver Foundation who track the number of infected computers, have seen a threefold increase in the last three months alone. More than 450,000 computers are now part of zombie networks or botnets, run by hi-tech criminals, they said. The rise is believed to be linked to the number of attacks that booby-trap websites or try to infect the machines of users.
Criminal gangs are very keen to recruit new machines to a botnet to create a resource that they can use or that they can hire out to other criminal gang for profit. A lot of spam and junk mail is routed through the machines, forming the botnet. The botnet can then be used to launch attacks on websites, as an anonymous store to collect details and stolen data, and to help with phishing scams. Most of the machines in the botnets are PCs running a version of Microsoft’s Windows.
The jump in individual zombie numbers is linked to a series of wide-spread attacks that inject malicious code on to legitimate websites that tries to compromise any visiting machine.
In recent months many hi-tech criminals have turned to web attacks to recruit new victims rather than rely on sending viruses out via e-mail.
Typically, a machine is compromised via a vulnerability in one of the programs it runs. Inside this initial attack program will be code that directs it to contact a C&C server which then downloads software to put it completely under the control of a botmaster.
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People should just do a few things to prevent such attack…keep anti-virus and internet security software up to date and also be cautious of programs that require authorisation.
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