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Cleaning Up Botnets Takes Years, May Never Be Completed

Posted by timothy on from the down-there-somewhere-let-me-take-another-look dept.

Once a botnet has taken root in a large pool of computers, truly expunging it from them may be a forlorn hope. That, writes itwbennett, is: the finding of researchers in the Netherlands who analyzed the efforts of the Conficker Working Group to stop the botnet and find its creators. Seven years later, there are still about 1 million computers around the world infected with the Conficker malware despite the years-long cleanup effort. 'These people that remain infected — they might remain infected forever,' said Hadi Asghari, assistant professor at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. The research paper will be presented next week at the 24th USENIX Security Symposium in Washington, D.C. (And "Post-Mortem of a Zombie" is an exciting way to title a paper.)

4 of 74 comments (clear)

  1. Vast majority will be in landfill... by Gordo_1 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    well before 10 years is up.

    1. Re:Vast majority will be in landfill... by swb · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I wonder how many infected systems either were originally VMs or physical systems turned into VMs that will live on in VM farms far longer because they support some obsolete or unupgradeable system or because nobody wants to turn them off.

      It's not hard to see systems that should eventually die off live on far longer thanks to virtualization.

  2. Re:However, by gstoddart · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If your critical infrastructure for your dam and nuclear plant is sending stuff out to the internet, you likely have bigger problems.

    However, I won't disagree with your point about vendors being impediments to security.

    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  3. Re:I'm confused by ThatAblaze · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Anyone who has a 8 year old computer has probably lost the installation media for it. Many of them might be running POS systems that don't work past win95. We're not talking about office or home computers here, those have all been changed out long ago. These are mostly old computers in a back room that have been plugging away at a single task for years.