Are Computer Crooks Renting Out Your PC?

An anonymous reader writes "Brian Krebs recently posted an interesting piece looking at an invite-only service marketed on shadowy underground forums that lets crooks 'rent' or 'buy' access to individual botted PCs that can be used to tunnel traffic. The story looks at the mechanics of renting out bots, and the author traces some of the infected systems back to real businesses. From the post: 'The Limited; Santiam Memorial Hospital in Stayton, Ore.; Salem, Mass. based North Shore Medical Center; marketing communications firm McCann-Erickson Worldwide; and the Greater Reno-Tahoe Economic Development Authority.'"

Comments

There are reasons for that...

[damn_registrars]

Santiam Memorial Hospital in Stayton, Ore.

I used to provide tech support for doctors offices and hospitals and I can tell you for a fact that their computer security ranges from "bad" to "OMFG!!".

That happens for several reasons:

• The software they use as part of their work requires admin access (bad vendor programming)
• The hardware they need to access requires admin access (more bad vendor programming)
• They consider needing an additional password for admin function to be "too inconvenient" (bad user education)
• They didn't need to do it when they used 3.x/NT/98/etc ... why should they need it now? (also bad user education)
• They were told that their anti* software would protect them, even without ever updating it - or anything else (bad vendors meeting up with badly educated users)