Internet security is a fickle notion

[kazi]

I just read an article in the WSJ which claims that a new massive botnet attack has been discovered, which has been doing its thing for the past 8 or 9 months. Security is not the strongest thing going on in the Internet world.

[Ganesha]

They say the smartest of the crooks are no longer doing it physically now. They hire some hacker (the white hacker community calls them crackers though), patch together some code and begin taking control of computers on the net. Because Windows was concieved not for the internet age, there are so many known and unknown vulnerabilities floating out there that exploiting only one would make their code work ( and people don't patch their computers for known vulnerabilities too. ). And then they could periodically have the infected computers email them activities/passwords/credit card details on them or use them to infect/spam other machines, do DOS attacks etc. At times, one rival gang even "fights" with another rival gang for control of those machines. Since the infected machines do not show their "infection" like viruses or trojans do, they can remain hidden on the infected machines for a long time. And trust me, this is a very lucrative business for them as they "earn" continuously virtually sitting out there.

This fact that crime is metamorphosising itself into the internet has been known for some time but a mechanism to effectively fight against it is yet to be realized. One of the difficulties is that the botnet phenonmenon is so cutting edge that we are still discovering their sophistication. Another is that the traditional security system does not have the potential to fight this internet phenonmenon by itself. It needs to be upgraded, updated and this will need a lot of money, time and energy. And even the developed countries are ill-equipped at this moment. So until this happens, we will keep on hearing about these botnets and their growing power on the net.

[kazi]

nice.. now this is progress.