Kneber Botnet

A new type of virus, known as Kneber, is estimated to have created a 75,000 machine strong botnet before being discovered by Netwitness last week. The Kneber botnet aims to gather login details for social and corporate networks. It is estimated that over 3,500 Facebook accounts were compromised as well as over 2,500 Yahoo accounts.

The discovery has led to much speculation on the increasing occurance of under the radar botnets, particularly within Corporate computing environments. It is also further evidence of the increased organisation behind cyber-criminals.

The key lesson of all this though seems to be that there are still a lot of companies and people playing fast and loose with their computer security. The botnet relies on the Zeus Trojan among others. Zeus has been detectable by many internet security packages for over a year so the key lesson here is to have a good anti-virus package and keep it up to date.