Friday, February 19, 2010

“Kneber Botnet” new virus that attacks E mail and facebook Accounts

I just read it in one of the articles in daily contributor this morning and had found out that there is another strong virus circulating around the web. This is a new type of computer virus, a dangerous new ZeuS botnet has reportedly infected almost 75,000 computers in 2,500 organizations around the world, including user accounts of popular social network websites.

“Kneber botnet“, gathers login credentials of online banking, government, financial organizations and even social networking sites such as facebook, twitter, Friendster and myspace, hotmail and even small email systems and then reports the gathered usernames and passwords back to the hackers known as netwitness. Further investigation revealed that many commercial and government systems were compromised, including 68,000 corporate login credentials .

The attack uses a piece of software called ZeuS, designed in Eastern Europe, that takes control of large numbers of computers.

The discovery of the new virus was dated back in January this year during a routine deployment of the NetWitness advanced monitoring solutions. Further investigation by the Herndon, Virginia-based software security firm revealed “an extensive compromise of commercial and government systems that included 68,000 corporate login credentials, access to email systems, online banking sites, Facebook, Yahoo, Hotmail and other social networking credentials, 2,000 SSL certificate files, and dossier-level data sets on individuals including complete dumps of entire identities from victim machines”.

"They're well funded, motivated and successful." Hackers using the new virus have infiltrated the computer networks of more than 2,400 companies in almost 200 countries over an 18-month period, the Herndon, Va.-based computer security firm reported.

Companies in Egypt, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the U.S. are the most frequently targeted in the attack, according to a research paper released by NetWitness.

Everyone please be aware, once you have receive any unsolicited email containing suspicious contents. Don’t dare open cause we don’t want our accounts be turned into ash.

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