From: InfoSec News (alertsinfosecnews.org)
Date: Wed Apr 22 2009 - 02:47:49 CDT

• Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2e8a5a04-2e8f-11de-b7d3-00144feabdc0.html

By Maija Palmer
Technology correspondent
FT.com
April 22 2009

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation and UK’s Metropolitan Police are
hunting a gang of six hackers based in the Ukraine who have hijacked
1.9m computers around the world, including machines at hundreds of large
corporations and 77 government departments.

It is the largest network of hijacked computers – or botnet – to have
been discovered. to date. It is 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.

In the UK alone, more than 500 companies were caught in the network of
infected machines, including both large and small businesses. Six UK
local government computers were compromised, while in the US, computers
at both federal and local government level were infiltrated, said Yuval
Ben-Itzhak, chief executive of Finjan, the IT security company that
discovered the network. He declined to name any of the businesses that
were affected, but said they included some of the largest global
corporations.

“With this many computers affected, everyone was there on the list – the
US Federal government, big universities, very large public companies,”
Mr Ben-Itzhak said.

[...]

--
LayerOne 2009, Information Security for the discerning professional.
May 23-24 2009 The Anaheim Marriott in Anaheim, California
Visit http://layerone.info for more information

• Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]