Criminal botnets earned two billion dollars
The results of the “most cybercriminal” year in the history of the Internet are summed up by The Washington Post.
According to experts, one of the most accurate indicators of the state of cybercrime is the level of spam. In October 2006, its level went off scale beyond 90% of all mail traffic ( Postini statistics). In the last two months alone, the volume of spam has increased by 60%, and the attackers have successfully mastered the new technology of graphic spam with content variations .
The volume of spam is a good indicator of the level of cybercrime, because junk emails are usually sent using botnets, that is, networks of zombie computers — home computers that are infected with a virus and send spam on command from the host’s network. In the criminal environment, botnets are considered to be very liquid goods and are constantly being sold and bought.
The more home computers infected, the higher the level of spam on the Internet Today, according to experts, spam botnets contain about 3-4 million PCs. And these are just spam bots, and there are the same networks that carry out DDoS attacks, they also consist of millions of machines. These systems will be activated if the owners of a site refuse to pay fraudsters for “security”
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The maintenance of a botnet is an extremely profitable business, which is the main source of income for modern cybercrime groups. For example, Israeli botnet specialist Gadi Evron estimates botnet profitability in the past year at $ 2 billion . This money was received mainly from phishing, by luring people to fake websites through spam. Interestingly, traffic from a user to a phishing site sometimes also passes through a botnet to fool anti-phishing systems in modern browsers. Alternatively, logins and passwords can be collected not on fake sites, but directly on users' computers.
Another proof of the heyday of cybercrime in 2006 is the change in the time of hacker attacks. It used to be nights and weekends. Now the attacks go during the day on weekdays. In other words, cybercrime has become a normal work for many people, except that this record is not made in the workbook.
Botnets have increased their numbers due to the fact that in the outgoing year many more holes in software were discovered. For example, only Microsoft released 97 “critical” patches for its programs, 14 of them called the so-called “zero day” patches, closing holes that Microsoft learned about the existence of after the cybercriminals started their successful. operation. For comparison, in 2005, Microsoft released just 37 "critical" patches.
This year, hackers began to expand their botnets using holes not only in the browser, but also in a text editor, media player and spreadsheets. Viruses began to penetrate into users' computers even through advertising banners .
According to experts, one of the most accurate indicators of the state of cybercrime is the level of spam. In October 2006, its level went off scale beyond 90% of all mail traffic ( Postini statistics). In the last two months alone, the volume of spam has increased by 60%, and the attackers have successfully mastered the new technology of graphic spam with content variations .
The volume of spam is a good indicator of the level of cybercrime, because junk emails are usually sent using botnets, that is, networks of zombie computers — home computers that are infected with a virus and send spam on command from the host’s network. In the criminal environment, botnets are considered to be very liquid goods and are constantly being sold and bought.
The more home computers infected, the higher the level of spam on the Internet Today, according to experts, spam botnets contain about 3-4 million PCs. And these are just spam bots, and there are the same networks that carry out DDoS attacks, they also consist of millions of machines. These systems will be activated if the owners of a site refuse to pay fraudsters for “security”
')
The maintenance of a botnet is an extremely profitable business, which is the main source of income for modern cybercrime groups. For example, Israeli botnet specialist Gadi Evron estimates botnet profitability in the past year at $ 2 billion . This money was received mainly from phishing, by luring people to fake websites through spam. Interestingly, traffic from a user to a phishing site sometimes also passes through a botnet to fool anti-phishing systems in modern browsers. Alternatively, logins and passwords can be collected not on fake sites, but directly on users' computers.
Another proof of the heyday of cybercrime in 2006 is the change in the time of hacker attacks. It used to be nights and weekends. Now the attacks go during the day on weekdays. In other words, cybercrime has become a normal work for many people, except that this record is not made in the workbook.
Botnets have increased their numbers due to the fact that in the outgoing year many more holes in software were discovered. For example, only Microsoft released 97 “critical” patches for its programs, 14 of them called the so-called “zero day” patches, closing holes that Microsoft learned about the existence of after the cybercriminals started their successful. operation. For comparison, in 2005, Microsoft released just 37 "critical" patches.
This year, hackers began to expand their botnets using holes not only in the browser, but also in a text editor, media player and spreadsheets. Viruses began to penetrate into users' computers even through advertising banners .
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/4884/
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