In May, German authorities arrested 18-year-old Sven Jaschan, who admitted to creating and releasing the Netsky and Sasser Internet worms, and a 21-year-old German man who admitted to creating the Agobot and Phatbot Trojans.
While online crimes skyrocketed in 2004, there were also a number of high-profile arrests of those involved in cybercrimes. "You don't see alerts on bots, however they have probably been a bigger problem (than viruses)."īut the news wasn't all bad. "Bots have largely gone ignored," said Hyppönen. Those networks range from 100 infected PCs to networks of thousands of zombie computers, which are rented out to aspiring spammers or for targeted DOS attacks used in online extortion rackets, Villa said. Towards the end of this year, we're looking at about 300,000," Villa said. "At the end of last year we knew of about 2,000 botnets. More Trojans have also led to an increase in the number of "botnets," distributed networks of compromised machines that act as "zombies" in spam campaigns or DDOS (distributed DOS) attacks. A Trojan horse program named Banker-AJ infected computers and waited until users visited online banking sites, at which point the program logged user keystrokes and captured account information, said Gregg Mastoras, senior security analyst at Sophos.
#Agobot codename cure half life 2 code
Trojans have been silent actors in a number of high-profile crimes, including the theft in September 2003, of source code for the "Half Life 2" video game. Trojan horse and backdoor programs are not new, but the rapid growth in their use in 2004 was a product of cooperation between virus writers, online criminals and spammers, said Jesse Villa, technical product manager at Frontbridge Technologies Inc. In just nine months, there were 480 different versions of the Trojan. The latest, RBot RN was identified on Dec. RBot-A, the first version of the worm-like Trojan, was identified in March 2004.
#Agobot codename cure half life 2 download
The program can collect system information, download and execute files, launch a denial-of-service (DOS) attack, and even remotely control a connected webcam. One typical example is the ubiquitous RBot, a Trojan program that spreads using a number of methods. Not since the days of Ancient Greece have Trojans been as much a part of popular conversation as they were in 2004, when an explosion in Trojan horse programs turned countless Internet-connected computers into tools for malicious hackers and international online crime organizations.Ĭarried on the back of e-mail and Internet worms, an eye-popping parade of back door Trojans marched onto vulnerable computers since January. "Phishing has really exploded, it's been one of the biggest problems we've had," said Mikko Hyppönen of Finnish antivirus company F-Secure Corp. The average phishing Web site operated for six days before being shut down, according to Peter Cassidy, secretary general of the group. The Anti-Phishing Working Group watched the number of reports of phishing Web sites increase by an average of 28 percent each month between July and November.
0 kommentar(er)
