FBI Releases Results of Operation Bot Roast

coondoggie writes to tell us that the FBI has released the findings of their recent botnet study and have identified over 1 million botnet crime victims. "The FBI is working with industry partners, including the Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University, to notify the victim owners of the computers. Microsoft and the Botnet Task Force have also helped out the FBI. Through this process the FBI may uncover additional incidents in which botnets have been used to facilitate other criminal activity, the FBI said in a statement.Bots are widely recognized as one of the top scourges of the industry. Gartner predicts that by year-end 75% of enterprises 'will be infected with undetected, financially motivated, targeted malware that evaded traditional perimeter and host defenses.'"

Comments

My conspiracy theory

[A nonymous Coward]

A. Everyone "knows" that the NSA is doing its utmost to listen to all internet traffic.

B. It would do the NSA no good to listen to everything without filtering out the 99.999% which is irrelevant. Ergo, they must have pattern filters.

C. Botnets must be a big part of the filtered traffic.

D. NSA must be aware of botnets, their patterns, their control channels, their zombie elements.

E. Yet botnets continue.

F. The NSA must want them to continue unmolested.

The NSA knows how botnets work, and could hijack them at any time. The only reason to do so is to keep them in reserve for their own use.

I suggest the NSA would hijack botnets for counterattack if the US nets were attacked by another country.

That's my conspiracy theory, I hope you like it.

I thought I knew what I was doing too

[elrous0]

I thought of myself as an expert until a few months ago. I have good antivirus/malware software, only use Firefox, never do stupid things like opening attachments with executable extensions, etc. Hell, I even have a wired network in my house to protect against wardrivers.

Then a few months back I get word from my credit card company that someone had hacked into my account online (using my username and password), changed my billing address to someplace in NJ, then proceeded to try to charge a bunch of stuff on the account (luckily the CC company caught on to them and locked it down). I couldn't figure out how they did it.

Then a few months after that, I started to notice my computer acting strange. My router would be showing HEAVY activity even when I wasn't doing anything and Windows wasn't downloading updates. Eventually, I realized that someone must had botted my computer (still don't know exactly what they were up to, but I'm sure it involved sending out letters from an innocent Nigerian official just wanting people to help him transfer some money). That's how they got my account info for my credit card.

Anyway. I wiped the whole system clean (even tried out Linux for a while, but didn't care for it) and now the problem is gone. But it still makes me nervous as Hell. What drives me crazy is that I can't figure out how they did it. But, as a hacker friend once said: If it's on a network, it can be hacked--period.