America's 10 Most-Wanted Botnets 84
Posted
by
timothy
from the lurking-on-your-parents'-desktops dept.
from the lurking-on-your-parents'-desktops dept.
bednarz writes "Network World ranks America's 10 most wanted botnets, based on an estimate by security firm Damballa of botnet size and activity in the United States. The leader is Zeus, with 3.6 million compromised PCs so far. The Zeus Trojan uses key-logging techniques to steal user names, passwords, account numbers and credit card numbers, and it injects fake HTML forms into online banking login pages to steal user data. At the bottom of the list is Conficker, which despite its celebrity status has compromised just 210,000 US computers so far."
!Botnet (Score:5, Insightful)
The leader is Zeus, with 3.6 million compromised PCs so far. The Zeus Trojan uses key-logging techniques to steal user names, passwords, account numbers and credit card numbers, and it injects fake HTML forms into online banking login pages to steal user data
And how the heck does that make it a botnet? Apparently now botnet is a buzword for any type of popular malware now. Now, if it said that it went and DDoSed websites, yes that would make it be a botnet, but this? That just is malware.
Re:car analogy... (Score:3, Insightful)
People don't go to the mall and leave their car unlocked*, so why do users think security on a computer is not just as important?
20 years of Microsoft trying to convince them security isn't an issue might have something to do with it.
Re:car analogy... (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft has made security a real issue since about 2000, or at least acknowledged it. Since about 2004 they have actually made significant headway solving the problem. Before then, they were pretty much completely negligent on securing their system or making users aware that Windows was like a sieve.
That adds up to about 20 years of ignoring security, the legacy of which is still causing problems today, such as the more than 10 million botted Windows machines across the world.