Comments on: Cyberattacks jam gov't, commercial Web sites in U.S., South Korea

A wave of cyberattacks aimed at American and South Korean government agencies and commercial Web sites continued on Thursday.
(From The New York Times)

[SIGHUP]

23 megabits a second? That is nothing. Any sites being taken down by that probably need to go down. Maybe now they will upgrade those T1s.

[gertruded]

I was not aware that there were 50 to 65 thousand Linux computers in that area of the world to be infected and run as a botnet. There might be that many computers running OSX though.

[wolivere]

I have seen estimates that upwards of 70% of systems used in these types of botnet attacks are cracked Linux servers. More so that they are preferred due to being on 24/7. And although many Linux admins are very sophisticated many are not and do not take the proper precautions. Due to cost they often are used by small groups, or even individuals.

Many of these admins are surprised when they are contacted and advised there system is being used to launch attacks.

Is the number really that high? hard to tell. I can't find exact numbers

I do remember not long ago reading about the huge number of compromised SSH systems exploited. And in this case SSH is typically default in Linux, and needs to be enabled in Windows. And often the issue was simple user name password combo's

Although GoldenCash also infected a large number of badly configured servers.

From a desktop world linux typically in the west is not as much a problem since the users are typically very computer literate, and often don't install SQL, FTP, APACHE which are typically the ones compromised. But linux has been picking up steam in many third world nations with users not so tech savy, and have been increasingly seen compromised. Although again, some argue that's older distro's that get hacked. Compromised is compromised. But if you really think linux can't be compromised just spend some time on linuxquestions.org to see how many people have picked up bots and viruses and are looking for help cleaning there systems.

[birdtford]

Where in this article does it say anything about Linux or even a number of infected machines?

[wolivere]

@birdtford

"They said 50,000 to 65,000 computers had been commandeered by hackers and ordered to flood specific Web sites with access requests"

3rd Paragraph

The Linux part was brought up by the previous poster, I assume more to troll, Since in many other articles specially ones that have an M and an S that lead to many linux guys flooding the forum.

So I responded to add some reality to the claim that all though yes this is not uncommon its not as common from the desktop.