Evil Trojan twins - 80% Vista News Discuss Evil Trojan twins - 80% in the Windows Vista forums; Evil Trojan twins control most of world's botnets Sdbot and Gaobot malware groups responsible for 80 per cent of botnets Clement James, vnunet.com 12 Apr 2007 ADVERTISEMENTTwo types ...

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Evil Trojan twins control most of world's botnets
Sdbot and Gaobot malware groups responsible for 80 per cent of botnets


Clement James, vnunet.com 12 Apr 2007

ADVERTISEMENTTwo types of Trojan are responsible for the control of most botnets worldwide, a security firm revealed today.

The Sdbot and Gaobot malware groups were responsible for 80 per cent of detections related to bots during the first quarter of 2007, according to PandaLabs. Other culprits, although on a much lesser scale, included Oscarbot, IRCbot or RXbot.

Bots are automated worms or Trojans that install themselves on computers to carry out certain actions automatically, such as sending spam and turning the compromised computers into zombies. Botnets, or networks made up of computers infected with bots, have become a lucrative business model.

"This dominance is not so much due to any special features of Gaobot or Sdbot, but simply because their code is much more widely available on the internet. This means that any criminals that want to make a bot can simply base it on the source code of these threats, making any modifications they choose. Essentially, this saves them a lot of work," said Luis Corrons, technical director of PandaLabs.

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http://www.vnu.co.uk/vnunet/news/218...-twins-control

Why do some people not upgrade or run scanners to keep them clean.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...r-botnets.html

With help from industry partners, the US Department of Justice and the FBI have released a statement that they have identified over one million computers who have become part of a botnet. The FBI and the Justice Department aren't just interested in finding and informing victims, however: they are actively working to locate and dismantle the operators of the botnets, known as "botherders." To date, the task force has nabbed James C. Brewer of Arlington Texas, Jason Michael Downey of Covington, Kentucky, and Robert Alan Soloway of Seattle Washington, charging all three of them with using botnets to send spam and disrupt other computers with DDos attacks.

In January, TCP/IP pioneer Vint Cerf estimated that one-quarter of all computers could be part of a botnet. This number is much higher than the FBI's one million out of an estimated 600 million computers connected to the Internet. Most of these computers are running older versions of Windows (older than XP SP2) but there are also botnetted machines running Linux and OS X, primarily servers running third-party server software such as PHP that has not been fully patched for security vulnerabilities. As new versions of Windows harden themselves against OS-level attacks, expect to see more attacks on third-party software, particularly as users are fairly lax at keeping it patched.