Malware gets more malicious, boots small country offline

Mar 26, 2009 1:40 PM

A record number of Web sites that steal your password and other information were detected by the Anti-Phishing Working Group in December, according to a report from the organization, which works to fight identity theft.

The group reported 31,173 sites that spread crimeware—malicious software programmed to steal your password and other information—an 827% uptick from January 2008. In addition, it received a yearly high of 34,758 phishing reports in October 2008.

Botnets are another worrisome online-security problem, according to Steve Gibson, a security consultant and owner of Gibson Research Corp. Infected computers are gathered into groups called botnets, sometimes comprising hundreds of thousands of PCs, that send out spam, phishing e-mail, and malware. "There’s such a strong incentive for getting a bot on someone's machine," Gibson says.

Those incentives range from the financial to the political. "Consumers may think, 'Who cares if my PC is a bot,'" says Ed Skoudis, co-founder of IntelGuardians. "But a bot can be used for an operation against the U.S. military or against the electric grid in your city."

One way botnets attack organizations is by using a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. "DDoS attacks happen from zombies [individual computers within a botnet] sending traffic to a certain IP address," says Gibson. "We’ve seen small countries taken off the Internet by botnets." One recent example: DDoS attacks targeted at the largest Internet service providers in Kyrgyzstan knocked most computers in the country offline in January, according to the SANS Institute, a security training organization.

People often ignore the most obvious sign that their computer is infected with a bot, says Gibson, which is slower performance. "Most people think it's just an older PC slowing down," he says. "They’ve been told to ignore one of the major indications that something is doing something to their machine."

Here are some steps you can take to safeguard yourself against malware:

Be sure your security software (Ratings available to subscribers) is up-to-date and running, and that you have a two-way firewall. You can get a free one from Zone Alarm.

Don't click on links in mass mailings of things like e-cards or videos.

Never open an .exe or .zip file attached to an e-mail.

Run updates of programs like Adobe Reader and QuickTime when prompted, but make sure the prompts you get are legitimate and come from the software company itself.