Autonomous Intelligent Botnets Bouncing Back 152
coomaria writes "Thought that 2009 was the year botnets died? Well, think again: compromised computers were responsible for distributing 83.4% of the 107 billion spam messages sent around the world every single day this year, and it's going to get worse if intelligent and autonomous botnets arrive in 2010 as predicted."
Re:What OS? (Score:3, Informative)
Windows is on around 90% of general-purpose computing devices, so I would expect at least 90% of compromised machines would be running Windows.
compromised computers ? (Score:4, Informative)
What Operating System did these 'compromised computers' run on ?
'Upon execution Bredolab attempts to inject into svchost.exe [nai.com] processes
Re:What OS? (Score:2, Informative)
Basically all of them.
Even with the increase in popularity of Mac OS X and Linux, malware for those systems is virtually unheard of. There was the recent malware incident involving some GNOME screensavers, but that's more a testament to the poor development practices of the GNOME project.
Re:What OS? (Score:3, Informative)
My guess would be somewhere in the region of all of them.
Make that "most of them". OS X botnets [networkworld.com] have been appearing for a while, and other forms of OS X malware [sophos.com] have been known [sophos.com] for quite some time [washingtonpost.com].
While many of these pieces of malware are fairly lame, I'd expect more and more "professional" variants of those in the future. One factor that shouldn't be overlooked is the generally complacent attitude of non-Windows users towards the security of their own machines (not unlike what you exhibit in your own post). In other words, from a technical point of view, if users download a malware-infested key generator and enter a password to execute it, it's pretty much irrelevant whether it's for OS X or for Windows. Arguably in this scenario, OS X is actually slightly more likely to be infected, since many Windows computers have at least some form of anti-virus software installed, while on other platforms this is still fairly rare.
Re:What OS? (Score:4, Informative)
The discussion is the botnets, and I haven't seen any running on Linux. Those are more of one-off, defacing attacks, or somewhere to run an IRC bot. If you intend on running a botnet for spamming, Windows users are the best targets. They'll click on almost anything, and once the malware is on, the user may complain about their machine going slow, but won't do anything about it.
Some of them are nasty. I keep a Windows machine laying around just to try particular things. I got some malware on it (I was doing bad things). It was about 5 seconds between the time I tried what I was doing, and the time I yanked the network cable out. The antivirus didn't catch it. Others that I scanned with couldn't find all of it. I spent the next two days trying to get it out. That was the first time that I ever had to wipe out and reinstall on a Windows machine to get rid of a piece of malware. It's not that I didn't know what I was doing. I've been doing this kind of thing for well over a decade now. I never did identify the problem child, so I can't even say what it was. It just made the machine almost impossible to use. Well, unless waiting 5 to 10 minutes to select a user and enter a password is acceptable, and another 10 to get to the desktop. I know during that period, it was re-propagating the tag-along malwares.
That one piece of malware brough along 40 unique friends in a matter of seconds. It infected files. It infected the MBR. It hooked into everywhere I looked. I knew it was a problem, which is why I took it offline immediately. Most users would leave it plugged in and running, and wait for someone to come fix it.
At least I'm not dependent on the Windows machine working. How many home users have their dependable Linux machine that they do work on, and the Windows machine sitting to the side to play with?
It has already happened (Score:2, Informative)