PCs For Sale from $0.05 Apiece Yes, you read the headline correctly, although it may not mean what you think it does. What we're talking about here is the illicit sale of compromised Windows PCs by the hundreds of thousands. These compromised systems, known as zombie hordes or botnets, are in high demand for the purposes of spamming, fraud, and large scale network attacks. Click the image for an animated demonstration. According to an article currently running at El Reg, Computer Associates warns that many worm writers are joining forces to make the largest bot net ever seen to date. Here's an excerpt from the article: "'The co-ordination between the Glieders and Fantibag Trojans can have a potentially devastating effect on desktop systems. This phenomenon is indicative of how malware is becoming increasingly sophisticated and more directly linked to criminal endeavours,' said Simon Perry, CA's VP of security strategy, EMEA. ...It almost goes without saying but all the MyTob variants, along with the Bagle downloaders, infects only Windows PCs. Apple, Linux and those few souls out there still running OS/2 are all immune, as usual. Standard defence precautions against viral attacks apply in defending against the various new Windows worms and Trojans released this week. Windows users need to apply the latest security patches, update anti-virus tools and to resist the temptation to open suspicious-looking emails. Applying a personal firewall wouldn't go amiss either." The compromised PCs in question are in so numerous in quantity that they are commonly sold for as cheap as a nickel apiece on the black market. I realize that it takes time and effort to secure a computer, but consider the weight on everyone else on the Internet a compromised system can cause. If running (and perhaps paying for) a myriad of security tools to keep your system even relatively safe seems out of the question, maybe it's time to switch platforms?
Yea I've been watching botnets for a while and they're growing. Imagine how powerful a huge botnet could be in terms of control over PCs and using them to do their bidding. I think a DoS would be the biggest threat from them.
Yeah, my network sees around 6,500 attacks per day, most of which are from zombie XP boxen. We're low profile, so we don't see many DDoSes, but I'm certain with numbers like that our bandwidth would cave in a long time before our firewall reached it's capacity... -AT