Vista - Zombie PCs: ‘Time to infection is less than five minutes’

Written by Andrew Nusca @ 9:24 am 10/21/2008



A fascinating — and horrifying — new article in The New York Times offers the lowdown on “zombie computers,” the half-a-million-or-so machines that are converted, assembled into systems called “botnets” and forced to do a shadowy figure’s bidding, namely in the form of automated programs that send the majority of e-mail spam, illegally seek financial information and install malicious software on still more PCs.

Lock up your Windows and children!

In what sounds like the plot of 28 Days Later — computer “rage,” anyone? – the Times reports that botnets are alive and strong, according to shadowserver.org, a site that tracks such things:



Read more at the Source:
Zombie PCs: ‘Time to infection is less than five minutes’ | The Toybox | ZDNet.com

I'm not surprised, you read all over the forums and newsgroups about the dangers of connecting a machine to the internet without having a firewall in place at the very least, which I think shows what a good move it was on the part of Microsoft to built one into the OS starting with XP, so you know that at least the user has some protection before they go messing everything up

I notice that amongst the responses to that article were a number arguing that the O/S in question " is over four years old and the problem has been addressed. I can take a new PC OOTB and place it directly on the network and let it sit there and it won't become compromised". I suggest that perhaps the bad guys have been engaged in a little evolution themselves. It's too easy to become complacent. Good find Brink. Thanks

In the days of "fast" and "getting faster" broadband,only an idiot would connect to the web,without a Firewall today,plus all the other software/hardware "protection" which is available.A sign of the times.As OS's become "smarter?" via more involved code-writing,the "scumbags" will always try and find a way to "get through"

Let's hope future OS's,have one or two "silent" tricks "under their hood",which can stop any of us becoming connected to a "botnet",via a warning,or silently tracing the offending "code",and sending some kind of "ping" signal,which will "melt" the offending "home" server,and turn the hard drive into a heap of rubble!!

Oops.

I wouldn't consider linking to the net without a firewall and such. I haven't had any problems since win2k, knock on wood.+

Gary

At least being infected will have a good music score.

LOL, true Smarteyeball.


I use a router with a built in hardware firewall, Avast antivirus, Comodo Firewall Pro, and an assortment of spyware scanners. I'm not paranoid.

Course you're not
I'm behind a router and run NOD32, SpywareBlaster, SuperAntiSpyware Pro, Windows Defender and the Vista firewall, I have a two year license for Online Armor firewall which I used on XP but was waiting for them to get the Vista version out of beta before installing on here.

Hardware router firewall, Vista Firewall, NOD32 3.0 antivirus/antimalware, Windows Defender