Manhunt for Ukraine-based hackers

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2e8a5a04-2e8f-11de-b7d3-00144feabdc0.html

By Maija Palmer
Technology correspondent
FT.com
April 22 2009

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation and UK’s Metropolitan Police are 
hunting a gang of six hackers based in the Ukraine who have hijacked 
1.9m computers around the world, including machines at hundreds of large 
corporations and 77 government departments.

It is the largest network of hijacked computers – or botnet – to have 
been discovered. to date. It is at least four times larger than botnets 
that have been discovered in the past, which have tended to include 
200,000 to 500,000 computers.

In the UK alone, more than 500 companies were caught in the network of 
infected machines, including both large and small businesses. Six UK 
local government computers were compromised, while in the US, computers 
at both federal and local government level were infiltrated, said Yuval 
Ben-Itzhak, chief executive of Finjan, the IT security company that 
discovered the network. He declined to name any of the businesses that 
were affected, but said they included some of the largest global 
corporations.

“With this many computers affected, everyone was there on the list – the 
US Federal government, big universities, very large public companies,” 
Mr Ben-Itzhak said.

[...]

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