“In their persistent quest to breach the Internet’s defenses, the bad guys are honing their weapons and increasing their firepower,” John Markoff reports for The New York Times.
Markoff reports, “With growing sophistication, they are taking advantage of programs that secretly install themselves on thousands or even millions of personal computers, band these computers together into an unwitting army of zombies, and use the collective power of the dragooned network to commit Internet crimes.”
“These systems, called botnets, are being blamed for the huge spike in spam that bedeviled the Internet in recent months, as well as fraud and data theft,” Markoff reports.
Markoff reports, “Although there is a wide range of estimates of the overall infection rate, the scale and the power of the botnet programs have clearly become immense. David Dagon, a Georgia Institute of Technology researcher who is a co-founder of Damballa, a start-up company focusing on controlling botnets, said the consensus among scientists is that botnet programs are present on about 11 percent of the more than 650 million computers attached to the Internet.”
Markoff reports, “‘It represents a threat but it’s one that is hard to explain,’ said David J. Farber, a Carnegie Mellon computer scientist who was an Internet pioneer. ‘It’s an insidious threat, and what worries me is that the scope of the problem is still not clear to most people.’ Referring to Windows computers, he added, ‘The popular machines are so easy to penetrate, and that’s scary.’
Markoff reports, “So far botnets have predominantly infected Windows-based computers, although there have been scattered reports of botnet-related attacks on computers running the Linux and Macintosh operating systems.”
MacDailyNews Take: Stop right there. Markoff reports of “scattered reports of botnet-related attacks on Macs” and leaves it at that, but we would like to know more. Where did these “scattered reports” originate? Were they accurate? If so, were these “attacks” actually successful? Yes, we’re highly skeptical. There have been “scattered reports” of Bigfoot-related “attacks” on people, too. Does that prove the existence of Bigfoot? We wonder, did Markoff include this sentence based on proven fact or as an attempt to soften the blow struck against Microsoft’s Windows by the Carnegie Mellon computer scientist he quoted in his previous sentence? Do you have any proof of any Mac OS X-based botnets in operation today or at any time, Mr. Markoff?
Markoff continues, “Some botnet-installed programs have been identified that exploit features of the Windows operating system, like the ability to recognize recently viewed documents. Botnet authors assume that any personal document that a computer owner has used recently will also be of interest to a data thief, Mr. Dagon said.”
Markoff continues, “Serry Winkler, a sales representative in Denver, said that she had turned off the network-security software provided by her Internet service provider because it slowed performance to a crawl on her PC, which was running Windows 98. A few months ago four sheriff’s deputies pounded on her apartment door to confiscate the PC, which they said was being used to order goods from Sears with a stolen credit card. The computer, it turned out, had been commandeered by an intruder who was using it remotely. ‘I’m a middle-aged single woman living here for six years,’ she said. ‘Do I sound like a terrorist?’ She is now planning to buy a more up-to-date PC, she said.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Whit” and “j.c” for the heads up.]
MacDailyNews Take: She ought to be planning to buy a Mac:
“By default, Mac OS X does not ship with any network services running. None. Not a one. Out of the box Mac OS X is not sharing files, running SSH, sharing its printers, or even exposing the CUPS configuration page to anything but the loopback port — and most consumers are running it in that default configuration. If you portscan a fresh install of Mac OS X, you get bupkis,” Adam Knight wrote for Mac Geekery back in April 2006.
Knight explained, “Contrast this to Windows, or even many Linux distributions, where services are run on the public ports by default. Doing this opens the machines to network-based attacks such as overflows and injections and whatnot. That’s what lets so many Windows machines become network zombies. Because the Mac ships with nothing running, there’s no door to get a foot into, and even with outstanding security issues for the local side, the system is secure enough on the public side that your standard machine is safe.”
Full article here.
Contact info:
To send comments and suggestions (about news coverage only) or to report errors that call for correction: nytnews@nytimes.com
John Markoff: markoff@nytimes.com
[UPDATE: 11:45am EST: Added contact info.]
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