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. [...] -- LayerOne 2009, Information Security for the discerning professional. May 23-24 2009 @ The Anaheim Marriott in Anaheim, California Visit http://layerone.info for more informationReceived on Wed Apr 22 2009 - 00:47:49 PDT
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