Botnet with 10,000 Machines Shut Down
A huge IRC botnet controlling more than 10,000 machines has been shut down by the security staff of Norwegian provider Telenor, according to the Internet Storm Center. The discovery confirms beliefs about the growth of botnets, which were cited in the recent distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack upon Akamai and DoubleClick that sparked broader web site outages.
Bot networks aggregate computers that have been compromised with trojans, allowing them to be remotely controlled by hackers. In the past year, the proliferation of e-mail borne viruses and auto-downloading trojans has dramatically increased the number and size of botnets, which now have economic value as Spam engines and tools in DDoS blackmail schemes. Compromised zombie machines were recently found on the networks of the U.S. Defense Department and Senate. "
