Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Big Boost in Zombie PCs Seen From Latest Windows Exploit

Antine Gonsalves writes on TechWeb News:

The virus exploiting a bug disclosed in Microsoft's latest security bulletin has commandeered nearly 50,000 Widows PCs each day in the last week, a security firm said Tuesday.

The average number of new zombie PCs recorded each day by CipherTrust has jumped since Aug. 14 to 263,000 from 214,000, Dmitri Alperovitch, research scientist for the Alpharetta, Ga., company said. The increase has been blamed on the most recent version of Mocbot, also called Wargbot and Graweg, which exploits the Windows flaw patched Aug. 8 by Microsoft.

The increase itself is not a surprise, given that spikes in the number of PCs commandeered by virus writers to spew spam or malware often go up when new worms or vulnerabilities are disclosed. What is unusual in this case, however, is how the machines are being infected.

More here.

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