Millions of computers ‘botnet’ victims - FBI Reported
According to FBI, Millions of computers roped into criminal ‘robot networks’
Hackers have remotely controlled about 2.5 million computers of unsuspecting owners to commit crimes using computer robot networks called “botnets,” the FBI said Thursday.
More than 1 million computers were infected with botnets when the FBI announced Bot Roast in June, and roughly 1.5 million more have been identified since then, the FBI said. Industry numbers suggest there are as many as 5 million infected computers.
According to an FBI news release, New Zealand authorities in tandem with the FBI this week searched the home of an individual — identified only by the cyber name, “AKILL” — whose “elite international botnet coding group” is suspected of infecting more than 1 million computers. AKILL is not in custody, the FBI said.
Since the operation was announced, 13 search warrants have been served around the world, and eight individuals — in Washington, Pennsylvania, Florida, California and Kentucky — have been indicted or found guilty of crimes related to botnets. Such crimes include fraud, identity theft and denial-of-service attacks in which computer Web sites and other resources are made unavailable.
In one denial-of-service attack, Jason Michael Downey, 24, operated rizon.net, a system for chat rooms known as an Internet Relay Chat. Downey was sentenced to a year in prison for launching numerous denial-of-service attacks on other IRC networks and their operators.
One of Downey’s victims reported financial damages of $19,500 because of the attacks, according to the FBI.
The schemes target more than networks and individual computer users. The FBI in a news release said attacks have ensnared the University of Pennsylvania and a major banking institution in the Midwest.
In the latter example, the FBI said, Alexander Paskalov, 38, and Azizbek Mamadjanov, 21, were convicted in a Florida court after they created a phony Web site for the banking institution and used it to obtain personal information from the institution’s clients.
Paskalov and Mamadjanov set up accounts for a fake company and used the bank clients’ personal information to transfer millions of dollars to bogus accounts, according to the FBI. Mamadjanov was sentenced to two years in prison, Paskalov to 42 months.
FBI Director Robert Mueller noted in a speech earlier this month that there is potential to attack entire networks, send spam, infect computers and inject spyware — not to mention more sinister crimes that threaten national security.
“Botnets are considered the Swiss Army knives of cyber crime. You name it, they can do it,” Mueller said during a speech at Penn State University. “A botnet could shut down a power grid, flood an emergency call center with millions of spam messages or disable a military command post.”
Here’s how botnets work: A hacker known as a “botherder” takes over computers using viruses, worms or Trojan horses. A Trojan horse is software that appears to perform a harmless task while cloaking its true function.
Computer users unwittingly grant access to the botherder by clicking on an advertisement, opening an e-mail attachment or providing information to a “phishing” Web page, which is a phony site that mimics a legitimate site.
Once they have access, botherders use the computers for their criminal enterprise, making it difficult to trace.
According to a September report from Symantec Corp., China had the most infected computers at 29 percent, followed by the United States at 13 percent. However, Symantec said, 43 percent of all command-and-control servers — which botherders use to relay commands to infected computers in their network — were located in the United States.
Symantec reported that in the first half of 2007 it had detected more than 5 million computers that had been used to carry out at least one cyber attack a day.
The number represented a 17 percent drop since the previous reporting period, Symantec said.
The decrease is indicative of stronger computer security and law enforcement initiatives like Operation Bot Roast that are forcing botherders to abandon the technique, Symantec reported.
Protecting your computer is as easy as “putting locks on your doors and windows,” according to an FBI news release. Make sure your anti-virus software is up to date, install a firewall, use complicated passwords and be careful opening e-mail attachments and advertisers’ links on Web sites, the bureau advised.
Source:CNN
