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New Mega-Botnet Discovered

yahoi writes "According to the DarkReading article, 'Researchers have discovered a major botnet operating out of the Ukraine that has infected 1.9 million machines, including large corporate and government PCs mainly in the US. The botnet, which appears to be larger than the infamous Storm botnet was in its heyday, has infected machines from some 77 government-owned domains — 51 of which are in the US government. Researchers from Finjan who found the botnet say it's controlled by six individuals, and includes machines in major banks.'"

5 of 257 comments (clear)

  1. Re:is it really this bad? by shentino · · Score: 1, Troll

    For starters they let MS off the hook too easily, which could be the reason that Windows sucks so bad at security in the first place.

  2. Re:Big PC's!!! by clarkkent09 · · Score: 0, Troll

    Has it occurred to you that the moderation itself was a joke? Whoosh to you!

    --
    Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
  3. Re:Can Help? by WgT2 · · Score: 0, Troll

    One thing I find in common to news about these bot-nets - they never talk about what OS they are running on. I don't know if the even know what OS they're running on, but they don't talk about it.

    I wish they would: the Windows mono-culture is proving to be a dangerous place.

  4. Re:Can Help? by crashumbc · · Score: 0, Troll

    [quote]This is true in windows too. Remember Storm? It was created with simple .exe files, not any exploits. I believe they just mass emailed 'greetingcard.exe.' Grandma ran it. [/quote]

    wish i had mod points..
    This a thousand times over.

    Windows is MUCH less secure then Linux. But if you had 100,000 grandma's opening a self-installing virus on Linux, you'd be reading about how Linux had a 99,999 user BOTNET (the last Grandma couldn't figure out how to click "yes" to the install as root question)

  5. Re:Can Help? by drinkypoo · · Score: 0, Troll

    Linux is probably more secure than any other Unixlike OS out there. Trusted Whatever? Fuck that. selinux. (Both are a PITA to administer, so that's no differentiator.) And since everyone and their mom is taking in the GNU userland and lots of other stuff like perl and python, yet every commercial Unix vendor patches these packages less often than Linux, they are by definition behind most of the time. Apple is particularly guilty of this, you'd think they could hire some people to update those things and run regression tests so that you can have perl modules from the last year or two, right?

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"