Get Smart about Business Spending
- Related Stories
-
Zombies try to blend in with the crowd
October 19, 2006 -
Worm sparks rise in zombie PCs
August 22, 2006 -
Microsoft: Zombies most prevalent Windows threat
June 12, 2006 -
Hacking for dollars
July 6, 2005
More than 43,000 new variants of such insidious software were found in the first half of 2006, making them the most active category of malicious software, Microsoft said in a Security Intelligence Report published Monday. In June Microsoft also flagged zombies as the most prevalent threat to Windows PCs.
"Attackers, with financial gain in mind, are clearly concentrating a significant amount of development focus on this category of malware," Microsoft said in the report.
Of 4 million Windows PCs found to be infected with some kind of malicious software in the first half of this year, about 2 million were running malicious remote control software, Microsoft said. The data is collected by Microsoft's free Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool, which runs when security updates are installed on Windows PCs.
While the number is high, it is actually a decrease from the second half of 2005, when Microsoft found that 68 percent of infected PCs contained a backdoor Trojan. Meanwhile, hackers are trying harder to make their networks of hijacked computers go unnoticed by moving to new Web-based techniques.
A computer compromised by such a Trojan horse, popularly referred to as a zombie PC, can be used by miscreants in a network of bots, or "botnet," to relay spam and launch cyberattacks. Additionally, hackers often steal the victim's data and install spyware and adware on PCs, to earn a kickback from the spyware or adware maker.
Rootkits, which make system changes to hide another piece of possibly malicious software, remain an uncommon threat. There has been a 50 percent reduction in this kind of attack against computers running Windows during the past six months, Microsoft said.
Microsoft introduced the Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool in January last year. An updated version of the program ships monthly with Microsoft's security updates. The tool aims to identify and remove prevalent malicious software from PCs.
See more CNET content tagged:
Windows PC, malicious software, zombie, threat, adware
And the problem is much worse than reported, because Microsoft's stats only count "authorized" PCs being updated. There are literally millions of PCs out there which are not fully patched, and comprise a hidden army an order of magnitude larger than Microsoft is reporting...
add content of story regarding bots to the above comments ...
throw in a bit of Oil money ... And, Yep! A HUGE national security
threat.
IMO, software is not a threat to national security. If anyone is actually such a threat, it's the hacker, imo.
Now if only we can kill the idiots themselves. Preferrably before they spawned and infest the HUMAN Genome further.
I'm not talking data loss, I am just talking about a complete wipe of the OS. Let them take the computer to a professional, have the data recovered and when they get the huge bill, maybe they will learn something. I believe it will take something like this before these amateur users wake up.
People are not allowed to drive cars without insurance. Why are computers different? The careless actions of the idiots out there are causing problems for everyone else.
vunerable to viruses, maleware and spyware???????
If you want (more) security from your OS then switch, doesn't
matter which one as long as it's not Microsoft Windows.
If switching OSs was such an easy solution, then why is that it's not being done? Because on the large scale that reflects the market penetration of PCs and MS OSs it isn't an easy solution. And it's not a cheap solution, either.
And before anyone points out that some of the softare is free: Don't be foolish. TANSTAAFL. It costs real money to switch software, even if the software itself is free.
mark d.
Just because Vista has been included in many of the recent critical
updates for XP doesn't mean that it shares many of XP's security
problems, does it?
Oh. Nevermind.
Also, apparently you haven't read how much Symantec and McAffee regard Vista's native security ROOB. It seems as if Vista's security is much too good to suit them as it has caused them to wonder if they are relevant anymore--to the degree that they are now complaining about it to the EUC and anybody else strange and dumb enough to listen such complaints...;) The fact that Symantec and McAffee are howling to the heavens about the level of standard security inside Vista makes me feel very good about Vista's security prospects in comparison with XP.
disconnect it. My computer is just fine, but of course, my computer
doesn't do Windows. It could, but I know better.
OSX is good.
Linux is better.
Even Solaris 10 is looking pretty interesting. I have downloaded that one but have yet to install it. I plan to soon, in order to play with it.
being sent out by zombie computers.. and how much is being sent
out by legit spammers? <legit spammers.. that's funny>
Open source software doesn't have this problem. I wonder why? Could it be because the code is open and thus gets fixed?
Security through obscurity doesn't work. The numbers don't lie.
And thanks to Vista, it's only going to get worse, as even antivirus companies are locked out from doing anything about it.
- If they can be zombied
- by wbenton October 28, 2006 8:42 PM PDT
- If they can be zombied, that means that they are hackable.
- Reply to this comment
-
(31 Comments)As such, we should use the skills of already caught and imprisoned hackers to hack into and take down those zombied PC's as a way to possibly reduce their sentences.
Offer them a 60 second reduction of their sentence for every zombied PC they took down. If they took down the entire 2 Million army of zombies they could reduce their sentence by 3.8 years.
Problem resolved quickly.
Walt