Slashdot Mirror
New Botnet Dwarfs Storm
ancientribe writes "Storm is no longer the world's largest botnet: Researchers at Damballa have discovered Kraken, a botnet of 400,000 zombies — twice the size of Storm. But even more disturbing is that it has infected machines at 50 of the Fortune 500, and is undetectable in over 80 percent of machines running antivirus software. Kraken appears to be evading detection by a combination of clever obfuscation techniques that hinder its detection and analysis by researchers."
Or you could just learn how to properly secure XP and not go clicking all willy-nilly on every email you receive.
With a combination of three free programs and a bit of common sense, I haven't gotten a single virus or bit of spyware on my XP box in literally years. ZoneAlarm, AVG, and Spybot make a fantastic defense.
Living With a Nerd
Last I heard, they were arguing the exact opposite - non-Windows systems are too hard for the government to break into.
And who knows, perhaps Kraken is sending your data to HLS on the side? If I made a government spy virus, I'd disguise it as a spambot too... the signal is lost in the noise.
This, needless to say, could also explain the surprisingly low discovery rate on standard AV tools.
[/tinfoil hat]
yes actually.
Viriuses and bots are Incredibly easy to get installed and infected on a PC. It's brain dead easy.
It's far harder to get a linux or OSX or BSD infection going as you trigger the "you are trying to install "XXXX" enter your admin information to allow this to install for applications that are going to get it's hooks in the system. all other applications ca reside in a location that is safer and installable by the user only. and YES you can do this in linux, a user can download compile and run or even install an app to the user directory and use it just fine.
all OSX users I know dont simply click yes to everything because the software makers have 1/2 a brain for those platforms. windows apps all think they need to shove crap all over the pc. and therefore pc users are usedto having even a fricking mp3 playing app shoving thing in the windows system directory, changing the registry, etc...
stop that stupid behavior (return to farking ini files in the app directory instead of the incredibly stupid registry) and stop installing 65,000 random dll's in the system directories.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Well, at least you have an opinion. It's really the mark of users that plain suck. Give all those same users who click on everything and anything that sounds vaguely interesting a nice, shiny new Ubuntu machine - ALL of the users mind you - so replace most people's Windows machines. See how long it takes those same people to be rooted. Now what will you complain about? Their sucky OS? Or their lack of ability to treat their computing resources as carefully as they SHOULD be treating their government ID's such as SSN's in the US and bank info, etc.? It's the users - not the OS.