Top Botnets Control Some 1 Million Hijacked Computers

Puskas writes "Joe Stewart is the director of malware research at SecureWorks, and presented a dire view of the current botnet landscape at the RSA conference this week. He conducted a survey of the top spamming 'nets, extrapolating their size from the volume of emails that flow across the internet. By his calculations, the top 11 networks control just over a million machines, hitting inboxes with some 100 billion messages a day. 'The botnet at the top of the chart is Srizbi. According to Stewart, this botnet — which also goes by the names "Cbeplay" and "Exchanger" — has an estimated 315,000 bots and can blast out 60 billion messages a day. While it may not have gotten the publicity that Storm has during the last year, it's built around a much more substantial collection of hijacked computers, said Stewart. In comparison, Storm's botnet counts just 85,000 machines, only 35,000 of which are set up to send spam. Storm, in fact, is No. 5 on Stewart's list.'"

Comments

Re:How do I tell...?

[Volante3192]

Put a good firewall in front of it and watch the packets go in and out. Any rogue port 25 traffic would be a big clue.

Re:Let's see some truthful tagging

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Here I go again. Every time I point out real shortcomings of an Apple product, I get modded to oblivion - "There are none so blind as those who will not see." Posted from my MacBook, BTW.

'Tis no mere canard or straw man. Simple economies of scale keep the Macs out of the botnets - not Cupertino prowess.

Microsoft is Swiss Cheese, that's wrapped in foil.

Apple is Swiss Cheese labeled as "Ementhaler" - believing that the luxury branding will ward off serious scrutiny, but leaving those holes exposed.

Lo! http://www.news.com/8301-13579_3-9905095-37.html

It's like this every year. Apple leaves vulnerabilities wide enough to drive a truck through, and I've lost count of the number of these things given away as prizes to the cracking teams.

Apple patch the OS like Microsoft used to, before Slammer. The ususal culprits? QuickTime and Safari.

The guys who cracked the MacBook Air need only have coupled this with the DNS flaw in AT&T customer TwoWire routers, and a very bad situation would exist in the wild. Not trivial - but not too difficult. The hard part was finding the flaw - now it's an exercise for the Kid33z. If there were an economically feasible number of Macs to do this, you can bet it would be crime syndicates and not kids - and you'd have a happy, Apple botnet.