Kneber botnet attacks PCs worldwide
Hackers in Europe and China successfully broke into computers at nearly 2,500 companies and government agencies over the last 18 months in a coordinated global attack that exposed vast amounts of personal and corporate secrets to theft, according to a computer-security company that discovered the breach. Starting in late 2008, hackers operating a command center in Germany got into corporate networks by enticing employees to click on contaminated Web sites, email attachments or ads purporting to clean up viruses, NetWitness found. In more than 100 cases, the hackers gained access to corporate servers that store large quantities of business data, such as company files, databases and email. They also broke into computers at 10 U.S. government agencies. In one case, they obtained the user name and password of a soldier’s military email account, NetWitness found. A Pentagon spokesman said the military didn’t comment on specific threats or intrusions.
At one company, the hackers gained access to a corporate server used for processing online credit-card payments. At others, stolen passwords provided access to computers used to store and swap proprietary corporate documents, presentations, contracts and even upcoming versions of software products, NetWitness said.
The new botnet that puts the potential threat of last year’s Conficker worm to shame is called the Kneber botnet, this new form of malware has infected more than 74000 computer systems across the world and is focused on stealing login credentials for e-mail systems, social networks and banking sites, according to Netwitness. Kneber is incredibly hard to detect and has reportedly compromised data from nearly 2500 corporate and government and corporate networks around the world. Here’s the latest on what’s going on and how you can protect yourself from joining the ranks of the Kneber botnet.
Netwitness says Kneber is a ZeuS Trojan botnet, a type of botnet known for its ability to target and steal key information stored on your computer such as login credentials.
More than half of the computer systems in the Kneber botnet also have the Waledac Trojan–a worm known to create e-mail spam botnets that was recently associated with Conficker.
Netwitness says Kneber controlled machines are in 196 countries. The five countries with the most significant instances of infected machines are Egypt, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United States.
Kneber only targets Windows machines, and computers are running Windows XP Professional SP2 make up the majority of the botnet. Netwitness did not report on infections among Windows 7 machines. Kneber is primarily found on machines in corporate and government infrastructures, but home users can be affected as well.
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