Online Crooks Fighting To Snatch Each Other’s Botnets

A few bunches of online crooks' are contending to grab the control of largest botnets. To accomplish this, they are sending out series of malware targeted to steal zombie PCs from their opponents and thereby build-up their own force of zombie machines.

Each gang that's participating in this battle wants to seize the biggest botnet, since the longer is the list of compromised PC under their control, the maximum amount of money scammers will pay in order to use them, as explained by Shane Coursen, who's a senior technology consultant in Kaspersky Lab. Informationweek published this on May 18, 2007.

As every gang already has its own botnet, everyone is trying to snatch the compromised PC of the opponent. These gangs are doing so to expand their army and diminish that of their competitors.

PandaLabs has also recently found a network of nearly 15,000 PCs infected with new botnet dubbed Barracuda.A. Infected computers' network was found to spread throughout 54 nations, as unearthed by PandaLabs. The malicious code could allow its author to launch a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) assaults form each infected computer, as reported by Net-security on May 17, 2007.

PandaLabs' Technical Director Luis Corrons said that such a network could be used for blackmailing firms that used Internet for their business. Scammers would demand huge amounts of money in order to stop launching an assault that might crash the computers of the target company. Pandasoftware published this on May 17, 2007.

As per the senior technology consultant for Kaspersky Lab, "It is a constant battle and the World Wide Web is flooded with PCs that are already compromised. What can be better than to commandeer an already compromised machine? The scammers can definitely benefit from it, since it is akin to an open door for these guys." Informationweek published this on May 18, 2007.

Related article: Online Card Fraud Shows Greater Tendency Than Chip and Pin

» SPAMfighter News - 5/28/2007