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.

In the last few weeks we have seen a sudden, marked increase in the number of calls we’ve been receiving about virus infections. There seems to be one main culprit – Internet Security 2010, a rogue anti-virus programme which appears more invasive than normal. We haven’t been able to work out a source yet. The bad news appears to be that many of the off the shelf internet security packages damage critical system files during their repair, often leaving the use facing a blank, un-responsive desktop when they log in.
For those who have been infected and still have a working desktop, we recommend using a combination of rkill.com, a command file and malwarebytes as the first steps in a clean up.

If you have a blank desktop left, specialist assistance will be required and you should contact Home Helptech who can arrange nationwide pickup, cleanup and delivery.

If you have any problems with these steps or any other problems please don’t hesitate to call one of our qualified engineers and technicians and we will be delighted to perform the required steps to deal with your problem.

| Lo-Call 1890 219 219 (Ireland) | Freefone 0808-CALHELP (UK) |

| Business Hours: Monday – Friday 9:45 to 6:30 & Saturday 9:00 to 12:00 |