Jan

4

Because of several large scale hacker attacks on U.S. military networks this year, a lot of attention has been paid to where these attacks are coming from. The clues always lead back to China. Apparently the culprits are Chinese government Cyber War units. But now some new players from China have been detected. In this case it’s a Chinese criminal organization that hires out its botnet (PCs that are secretly controlled by the crooks) for various Internet based scams. There are currently 4-5 million PCs that have been infiltrated by hackers, turned into “zombies”, and used by crooks for sending out spam, or performing other illegal acts. This has become a big business, with each PC in a botnet producing $300-$500 a year, or more, for those who control them. Botnets of 100,000 or more PCs are not unusual, and many of them are for “rent.” The Chinese gang is suspected of doing jobs for the Chinese government, including trying to infiltrate American military networks. China has very tight control over its Internet users (over 130 million at last count). Content filters software monitors, and a staff of over 30,000 “Cyber Cops” makes it difficult to do anything on the net, that the government does not like, and get away with it. Thus it is believed that some of the Chinese Internet gangs stay out of jail by not attacking Chinese targets, and doing contract jobs for the Chinese government. …..Meanwhile, the use of botnets for spamming has created the current situation, where over 90 percent of all email sent is spam. The botnet armies are not only powerful, and lucrative tools for criminals, but also powerful weapons for governments.


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