In January this year, 20-year-old Jeanson James Ancheta pleaded guilty in a California court to charges that he had broken into government computers and taken control of them for purposes of fraud. He had planted Trojan software on the systems at the China Lake Naval Facility in California’s Mojave Desert, enabling him to manipulate computers on the network there. He had then used the computers to generate hits on Web site advertisements, for which the advertisers paid according to the traffic they received. The spyware or Trojan horses they plant on unsuspecting users’ machines do not draw attention to themselves, but once installed, they work as slaves to their remote masters. Bot networks, which are armies of these hijacked computers, have become the predominant feature of the Internet threat landscape.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The botnets are used by their owners to defraud Internet advertisers, as in Ancheta’s case, or they can be rented out by the hour to those who want to carry out cheap mass-mailing campaigns. Extortionists may also rent them to launch denial-of-service attacks on legitimate Web sites.<\/p>\n
“We are seeing less of the big virus outbreaks such as Sasser and Blaster, and so some people believe the situation is getting better, when in fact it is getting worse,” said Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at security company F-Secure. He sees botnets as a major problem that cannot be easily fixed, because the hijacked machines are mostly home PCs connected to an ADSL line.<\/p>\n
“Once active, it monitors every Internet connection, every access to Web pages and access to the bank, and reports it back to the creator of the Trojan,” Sancho said.<\/p>\n
While Windows PCs remain the prime target for attacks, prepare to see more activity targeted at the mobile phone. F-Secure recently detected the first malicious Java software on a cell phone, meaning it could affect most handsets, and not just the high-end models, Hypponen said. And in March, he spotted a Trojan horse that plants itself on the cell phone and calls a premium rate number in Russia, each time clocking up five euros ($6.04) for the criminal who sent it.<\/p>\n
Even so, the rapidly growing world population of broadband users means that botnets will continue to be the main focus for Internet criminals.<\/p>\n
All of the people in the Rogues Gallery of the world’s top 10 spammers, on the Spamhaus Project Web site, are constantly topping up their networks with new zombie machines owned by people with little concept of security.<\/p>\n
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