China Threatened With Increasing Bots

Bot programs and Trojan horses, infecting computers, are the most serious threats on the Internet in China. System compromises resulting from these malware have grown over 20-fold in 2007, the nation's CN-CERT (China's Computer Emergency Response Team) revealed in its annual report for 2007 released in the third week of April 2008, as reported by Security Focus on April 21, 2008.

According to the country's CERT statistics, the number of Chinese IP addresses for infected computers increased in multiples of 22 during 2007. As per estimates by the report, a total of 6.23 Million bot-infected PCs connected with net, about 3.62 Million belong to China's address space.

In the meantime, according to security industry specialists, a botnet refers to a group of online computers that have been hijacked to forward viruses or spam to other PCs connected to the Internet, without the knowledge of the computer owners. Each such personal computer is called a zombie that has been converted into a 'bot' that obeys the commands of a virus originator or spam master.

The CN-CERT report also notes that Trojan programs cause various problems ranging from privacy infiltration to financial losses, as reported by Security Focus.

The report also said that there is an increasing use of trojans to steal secrets of the state leading to incalculable losses, according to a translation from Google.

Further, the security factor of Chinese computers has raised concern for several countries as cyber attacks from China have been constantly increasing. More specifically targeted attacks on large companies and systems of national governments have been traced to Internet addresses belonging to the Asian giant.

The new report from CN-CERT further finds that there has been an almost three times jump in the registration of domain names in the country during 2007. Attacks that involved tampering with lawful Websites increased one and a half times, and malware attacks to compromise systems jumped 2.6 times.

Reporting in the same line, Symantec, the security vendor, stated in its, Internet Security Threat Report, that in the Asia Pacific region, Beijing was next to Japan in suffering attacks from over 81,000 botnets.

Related article: China’s Best Initiatives To Deal With Spam

» SPAMfighter News - 4/24/2008