Where are the bots?
Just rereading this article over at SecurityFocus and wondering…
An American computer security consultant on Friday admitted to using massive botnets to illegally install software on at least 250,000 machines and steal the online banking identities of Windows users by eavesdropping on them while they made financial transactions.
Out of those 250K machines, how many are not home user machines? I’m guessing a larger number than anyone expects. Having worked my inlaws through a few malware infestations personally, I can tell you that the stuff is insidious. Virus scanners can’t detect it, or are disabled by it. Out of 4 spyware scanners I tried, only a combination of a few of them were able to find and remove it.
Are you running an outbound firewall? Is every computer in your enterprise? Are you being alerted when random connections to IRC channels are made, or when HTTPS websites are being contacted while your web browser is closed? If not, yours may be one of those 250,000 machines.
December 7th, 2007 at 3:20 pm
I bet those 250,000 home users are happy with Internet Explorer which is as insecure as hell. I hate Microsoft for making it impossible for ordinary users not to install IE. They caould have made it an option, anywayz! even advanced users have difficulty removing IE from Windows install. This browser is vulnerable to spyware – it attracts all kinds of nasties from the web. Never, ever use IE for online finance!