Net criminals spurn virus attacks

NI Wire

New Delhi

Sat, 21 Jul 2007: 

July 21: The new hi-tech criminals have changed the way of cyber crime include hacking, spreading virus, worms, Trojans etc. and have discovered a new way, wch is much harder to recognise and kill, warn cyber security experts.

As the trends of Wikis and social networking sites are growing on, the chances of cyber crimes has also been increased, because some cyber criminals are misusing these sites as a tool to attack on the target. The dangerous hackers have adopted this way of crime to attack on the enemies instead of hijacking home PCs.

Hi-tech criminals use ‘botnets’ as a tool to commit crime as it easily does not reveal sources of the crime and simply damaged bulk of computers without getting recognised.

Botnet (roBot Network) is a large numbers of compromised computer networks that is used for spreading Spam, virus and worms. It is also able to decode the secret information like login password or credit card password. Some botnets are extremly powerful, which paralyse the server by hitting huge amount of data. The computer begins to perform rejection work. Usually it attacks on the windows based machines in the form of attractive emails or any booby-trapped webpage.

According to Paul Sop, the chief security officer of a security firm Prolexic, “Many botnets are also used to attack other computers in denial of service attacks which try to overwhelm the target server with huge amounts of data.

Computers, usually Windows machines, get enrolled in a botnet when their owners open an e-mail bearing a virus or visit a booby-trapped webpage.

But, said Paul Sop, chief technology officer of security firm Prolexic, “Many file-sharing systems use hubs or servers that point people to the right place to download the movies, music and other media they are interested in. If a hub was going down for maintenance it would tell people to connect to another one.”

This is an administrative fault, which is done by botnets. A powerful botnet is able to create huge traffic with tens of thousands of slackness files shares that paralyse the system and it negate the performance services.

“The file-sharing network attack is one of the biggest and involved gigabits of traffic every second. No virus or worm is involved but a target site can be saturated with the traffic. Prolexic has also seen these sorts of attacks. On the popular page attackers places a chunk of Javascript code which tell the computers of visitors to bounce data off the target site”, said Paul Sop.

Andre' M.Di Mino, the administrator for the Shadowserver Foundation which tracks botnets, said, “The topologies are varying as we see more P2P and http nets each day, this is a very growing and troubling trend."

“As the servers themselves are compromised, even the most careful end-user is now more vulnerable for infection”, added Di Mino.

Using these methods the hi-tech criminals have committed some of the biggest crimes security experts have ever seen.