New Massive Botnet Building On Windows Hole

CWmike writes "The worm exploiting a critical Windows bug that Microsoft patched with an emergency fix in late October is now being used to build a fast-growing botnet, said Ivan Macalintal, a senior research engineer with Trend Micro. Dubbed 'Downad.a' by Trend (and 'Conficker.a' by Microsoft and 'Downadup' by Symantec), the worm is a key component in a massive new botnet that a new criminal element, not associated with McColo, is creating. 'We think 500,000 is a ballpark figure,' said Macalintal when asked the size of the new botnet. 'That's not as large as some, such as [the] Kraken [botnet], or Storm earlier, but it's... starting to grow.'"

Comments

Uh oh

[Stereoface]

Does that mean Macs have 10% of the market share of annoying ass spam networks? Cause they've already got 100% of the annoying and misleading commercials...

Re:Idiots

[silarulz]

Or Just move to Linux, BSD, OSX...

when most of your business

[nimbius]

revolves around unscrupulous business tactics and emergency fixes to a dated and uncompetitive product turned fixture by lock-in, an enormous spinning vortex of shit known as a botnet is only natural.

Windows vista and its DRM in and of themselves are a botnet that offer you plugins and upgrades at the expense of your CPU time and sanity much the same way a botnet effectively doles out dickpill adds.

you can hurl your best in-house antivirus at it, but since that was composed by coders flogged to the finish line by marketing, i dont see how thats destined to placate the issue.