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New Kneber Botnet Tied To 75,000 Systems
Doug Caverly
Staff Writer
2010-02-18
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
This may turn into an unplug-your-computer-and-pay-for-everything-with-cash kind of day for some security experts. NetWitness announced this morning that it's discovered a new ZeuS botnet affecting 75,000 systems in 2,500 organizations. Social networks, financial systems, and government organizations are all thought to have been compromised.
 | | New Kneber Botnet Tied To 75,000 Systems |  |
In a formal statement, NetWitness explained how it originally came across the problem, indicating that it "first discovered the Kneber botnet in January during a routine deployment of the NetWitness advanced monitoring solutions."
Then, "Deeper investigation revealed an extensive compromise of commercial and government systems that included 68,000 corporate login credentials, access to email systems, online banking sites, Facebook, Yahoo, Hotmail and other social networking credentials, 2,000 SSL certificate files, and dossier-level data sets on individuals including complete dumps of entire identities from victim machines."
This means that the Kneber botnet has moved well beyond a straightforward focus on banking information. Also, as you might have guessed after seeing such large numbers, Kneber has managed to infect systems all over the world.
And here's one more disconcerting piece of information: machines infected with Kneber were infected with another botnet, Waledac, more often than not, which would seem to point to the existence of an alliance between hackers.
Anyway, different organizations still appear to be in the process of determining how much damage has been done; it's too early, in other words, to say what measures will be taken as a result of NetWitness's announcement.
Perhaps there's at least some small amount of comfort to be had in the fact that this new threat is hardly a fraction of Conficker's size.
About the Author:
Doug is a staff writer for SecurityProNews, InternetFinancialNews, SearchNewz, and WebProNews.
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