Zombie PCs: ‘Time to infection is less than five minutes’
Written by Andrew Nusca @ 9:24 am 10/21/2008A 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:
“The mean time to infection is less than five minutes,” said Richie Lai, who is part of Microsoft’s Internet Safety Enforcement Team, a group of about 20 researchers and investigators. The team is tackling a menace that in the last five years has grown from a computer hacker pastime to a dark business that is threatening the commercial viability of the Internet.
Read more at the Source:
Zombie PCs: ‘Time to infection is less than five minutes’ | The Toybox | ZDNet.com