A newly discovered strain of malware enslaves PCs and raids them of ‘valuable’ information.–PC Pitstop.
New Malware Makes Your PC a Zombie Soldier
By Bob Rankin
A new Trojan Horse malware program appears to be written entirely from scratch, a rarity in the malware trade and a special cause for concern among security researchers, anti-malware developers, and end-users. Here’s what you should know…
Pandemiya Pandemonium
Researchers at RSA Security discovered the new “Pandemiya” program while trolling hacker forums for clues of what the bad guys are up to. According to RSA’s Eli Marcus, Pandemiya contains over 25,000 lines of fresh code, and is intended to be an alternative to the Zeus botnet platform that enslaved several hundred thousand PCs worldwide.
Pandemiya infects victims mainly through drive-by downloads delivered by exploit kits, an increasingly popular channel among cybercrooks because it works so well. I wrote about this recently in How NOT to Get Exploited. It takes almost no technical expertise to set up an exploit kit on a bogus Web site offering fake security freeware. Unwitting visitors have their systems “scanned for vulnerabilities” while selected malware is downloaded and installed on their machines without their knowledge.
Pandemiya Virus
Boom! Your computer is now a zombie soldier in a botnet. Its resources will be combined with those of other slave machines to launch massive Distributed Denial of Service attacks; send gigabytes of spam; and perform other illicit tasks for the botmaster. But that’s not all; Pandemiya also raids the PC it has enslaved.
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Excerpt shared with permission from Bob Rankin.
