Investigation Into Cyberattacks Stretches Around the Globe

Jeremy Kirk, IDG News Service

Jul 14, 2009 6:04 pm

http://www.pcworld.com/article/168415/investigation_into_cyberattacks_stretches_around_the_globe.html?tk=nl_dnx_h_crawl

British authorities have launched an investigation into the recent cyberattacks that crippled Web sites in the U.S. and South Korea, as the trail to find the perpetrators stretches around the world.

On Tuesday, the Vietnamese security vendor Bach Khoa Internetwork Security (Bkis) said it had identified a master command-and-control server used to coordinate the denial-of-service attacks, which took down major U.S. and South Korean government Web sites.

A command-and-control server is used to distribute instructions to zombie PCs, which form a botnet that can be used to bombard Web sites with traffic, rendering the sites useless. The server was on an IP (Internet Protocol) address used by Global Digital Broadcast, an IP TV technology company based in Brighton, England, according to Bkis.

That master server distributed instructions to eight other command-and-control servers used in the attacks. Bkis, which managed to gain control of two of the eight servers, said that 166,908 hacked computers in 74 countries were used in the attacks and were programmed to get new instructions every three minutes.

But the master server isn’t in the U.K.; it’s in Miami, according to Tim Wray, one of the owners of Digital Global Broadcast, who spoke to IDG News Service on Tuesday evening, London time.

(more at the link above …)

* Alan Spicers Note: What’s scary about this is that 166 thousand computers (PC’s) have been compromised and made into Zombies for this purpose. So if your computer is not feeling well or is acting strange? Get it checked out.

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Alan Spicer

http://www.marinetelecom.net

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