THE LARGEST ZOMBIE NETWORK EVER IS REVEALED

LARGEST ZOMBIE NETWORK EVER IS REVEALED

A botnet of 1.9 millions computers have been revealed. A botnet is a collection of computers controlled by malicious cyber criminals  Authorities says they have found 6 hackers behind this botnet, which makes enormous sums of money on this botnet. One of the main servers are found in Ukraine and believed to be the hub for this botnet.

Finjan Vital Security discovered this huge botnet in March 2009. This botnet are controlled by a small group of cyber criminals which utilize the machines in the botnet, called zombies through a sophisticated control system. The botnet can be used to more or less anything through this control system.

Finjan revealed that they could track the system back to 6 hackers that control this system of 1.9 million computer zombies. This is the largest collection of zombies ever found in internet history and the collection increases by the hour.

The botnet spread has been active since February 2009 and is only directed towards Windows XP machines. The servers used for controlling this activity is lying in Ukraine and the security experts have got lots of information from this server.

It is an advanced system built up as the hackers uses a very sophisticated control system where they have software that lets them do just about anything with the zombies in the botnet network. A Command Editing panel gives the hackers the opportunity to download Trojans and other malicious material and software. One of these Trojans in this network was only detected by 4 of the 39 available anti virus software packages. This is worrying not only to these anti virus companies, but to you as a user, as you trust these anti virus packages to handle most threats against you and your machine.

45% of the zombie infected machines are in the U.S.A.

At an internet security conference called RSA, Finjan told about their discoveries and could tell more about what the hackers used this botnet for.

The huge botnet gives the criminals good income as they can earn as much as 190.000 USD in only one day by renting out the Zombie network to interested parties. Those who are interested, gets value for their money, as the control system for this botnet gives the opportunity to copy files, key logging and send spam emails or take screenshots of these zombies in the botnet.

As said earlier, it is only the Windows XP operating system that is targeted in this botnet, and around 77 of these zombies are government computers in the U.S.A and several other countries.

The other question you will have to ask yourself, is why does not the major anti virus companies like Norton, Kaspersky, NOD and others find these resources first? Why does a company like Finjan detect it, and also reveal that less than 10% of the commercial anti virus software can detect virus and the malicious software coming from this activity?

I am certain that the millions of dollars the commercial software companies are getting from sales of their software, should be spent more on collaborating than trying to compete each others out. There seems to be more and more in need of collaboration in development of anti virus tools, but also legislation for internet that will prohibit Internet Service providers that does not comply with a certain set of rules and directives to be excluded from the Domain name Server lists.

We can only welcome a stronger international collaboration through a Cyber Interpol that will have a strong control and authority to exclude certain countries to be part of the world wide web unless they comply with a certain set of rules. However, i realize there is a balance between sensorship on the internet and freedom, however, we can not allow a total anarchy on the internet. Our society has become far to much reliable on the internet and has to regard the internet infrastructure as important as their physical infrastructure like roads and telecom and such.