Infosecurity

Botnet infects computers worldwide

By Alice Kok | 29 April 2009

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.

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Finjan’s Malicious Code Research Centre (MCRC) uncovered the 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.

According to Finjan, Britain’s Police Central e-crime Unit (PCeU) and the FBI are working to hunt down the hackers responsible for the botnet. This giant network of remotely-controlled PCs are believed to be the work of six cyber criminals based in the Ukraine.

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.

The malware spreads when victims visit compromised websites, which downloads the malware code. From then o,n hackers can remotely control the computer to execute almost any command on the end-user computer as they see fit—such as reading emails, copying files, recording keystrokes, sending spam, making screenshots.

The security firm said it has contacted affected corporate and government agencies to let them know that they were part of the infected computer names. Yuval Ben-Itzhak, Chief Technology Officer of Finjan, said: “The sophistication of the malware and the staggering amount of infected computers proves that cybergangs are raising the bar.”

According to Finjan, 78 per cent of infected computers were running Internet Explorer, 15 per cent were using the Firefox Web browser and the remaining were using Opera, Safari and other browsers.

Almost 45 per cent of the infected computers were in the US, and six per cent of the botnet computers were in the UK.