Microsoft Conducts Massive Botnet Takedown Action 302
h4rm0ny writes "Microsoft, in cooperation with Federal agents, conducted what the Wall Street Journal described as 'sweeping legal attacks' as they entered facilities in Kansas City, Scranton, Pa, Denver, Dallas, Chicago, Seattle and Columbus, Ohio to seize alleged 'command and control' machines for the Rustock botnet — described as the largest source of spam in the world. The operation is intended to 'decapitate' the botnet, preventing the seized machines from sending orders to suborned PCs around the world."
Re:Microsoft helps the internet (Score:4, Interesting)
Linux marketshare is huge everywhere but the desktop...
Supercomputers - 80-90% linux, who wouldnt want to hack into a top500 supercomputer?
Phones - android linux, iphone running an osx derivative..
Servers - linux is pretty big in the server market, servers make far more attractive targets for hackers since they're usually more powerful and have more bandwidth.
Embedded - linux is pretty big in the embedded market too, lots of networking equipment runs linux, lots of pvr devices too, ip telephony handsets, all kinds of stuff.
In terms of overall installs, i wouldn't be surprised to find that linux actually outnumbers windows quite considerably.
Re:Microsoft helps the internet (Score:5, Interesting)
Except that you can have as much security as you want, but there'll still always be people who click yes to every message box because they want... I dunno, whatever the craze is these days. 100 free animated cursors or whatever. It's not the fault of people like us, who would know how to spot a botnet, it's the fault of people that don't know, and don't care. The same would happen on *nix if you had huge quantities of people who would give anything and everything root just because it asked. What MS really need to do is educate people - instead of an intimidating dialogue that says "DO YOU WANT TO ALLOW THIS YES | NO" there needs to be an explanation of the consequences.
Actually, my parents and my neighbor are all all of the ilk that click yes to everything. They constantly infected their machines until I installed Linux for them (I used the Vista is crap FUD wars in my favor). The UI difference between XP and Win7 or Vista is somewhat similar to the difference they encountered on Linux, and there are FOSS replacements for all of the things they need to do: Email, Web, music & video, simple games, Create / Open documents & PDFs (Open office actually opens a few of my mom's MS docs that MS Office wouldn't, and the OS's print to file:PDF is a brilliant built in feature.)
My neighbor (a 75yr old retired mechanic) has actually commented that he finds the Linux OS prompt dialogs easier to understand & more informative.
Windows: User Account Control stops unauthorized access to your computer. If you started this action, continue. ____(Program/Action)____
____(Publisher)____
Linux: To install or remove software, you need to authenticate. (An application is attempting to perform an anction that requires privileges. Authentication is required to perform this action.
Password: ____
(click here for details)
Action: ___
Vendor: ____
He has less problems using Linux (shaky hands -- Gnome has drag & drop threshold, no more accidental file copy or moves).
The yes-clickers still click yes to everything, they have tons of software installed from the repositories that they don't really need, just because they never uninstall things after they try them. They have yet to contract a virus. Theoretically they are still at risk, and if the Linux using crowd becomes a large enough target, we may see more viruses in Linux (this theory has yet to be proven, and fails to consider that, unlike Windows, Linux has many different distributions and a better update policy).
However, right now, Windows is the only OS that has rampant malware problems. If you are concerned with the rampant virus problem, it would be wise to not willfully expose yourself to it by not using the only OS brand with such a problem... It seems like a simple solution, UI difference FUD & incompatible application FUD be damned; I've found that most people who actually give desktop distros of Linux an earnest try have no more problems than people upgrading from XP to Win7.
Yes, there are people who must use some program that just doesn't have a FOSS replacement or run well in WINE -- These people are not the average user that has been trained to clicks yes to everything and hosts botnets.
Re:Microsoft helps the internet (Score:4, Interesting)
there'll still always be people who click yes to every message box because they want
I'm not a network admin, but sometimes I wonder if the place to trap this is upstream at the ISP - So if my mum's box is a bot it doesn't matter (other than the slowdown) because the "bad" traffic from her machine is stopped at the ISP?