Stealth Botnet Infects Nearly 2 Million Systems

[Peaches]

Stealth Botnet Infects Nearly 2 Million Systems

Siobhan Chapman, Computerworld UK

Saturday, April 25, 2009 1:14 PM PDT

One of the largest botnets ever to be discovered has infected 1.9 million computers around the world, including corporate and government machines, according to a security firm.

Finjan's Malicious Code Research Center (MCRC) uncovered the huge botnet when researching command and control servers operated by cybercriminals. It is reportedly at least four times larger than botnets that have been discovered in the past, which have tended to include 200,000 to 500,000 computers.

Britain's Police Central e-crime Unit (PCeU) and the FBI are working to hunt down the hackers responsible for the botnet, according to Finjan.

A cyber gang made up of six criminals based in the Ukraine are believed to be responsible for the giant network of remotely-controlled PCs.

In the UK alone, more than 500 companies were caught in the network of infected machines, including several PCs inside six UK government bodies. In total, 77 government-owned domains from around the world, at both federal and local government level, were infiltrated.

PC World - http://tinyurl.com/dbdfrs

[mewi]

You know what is amusing about the name of this "Stealth Botnet" is that it is almost an identical name to Stealth Bot, a popular chat bot used to log onto battle.net servers for Blizzard Games.