They tend to swell to massive numbers before they are even detected at times.
And even if one botnet survives, it can restart another wave of attack.
And just like in the movies, such zombie machines can be very difficult to terminate.
We at Techworm, are rounding off a list of the top 5 most prevalent and frightening zombie Botnets.
1} Storm
This is the oldest among all the attacks in our list.
The authors of this attack used tactics that would later be used by other authors.
It was a very huge attack too, infecting around 10 million Windows computers at its peak.
Storm was probably the first attack of such magnitude that was used for financial gains by cyber criminals.
The creators separated their massive botnet web link and managed to sell it off as well.
2} Conficker
Another old and vast botnet attack.
Again, Conficker targeted only Windows computers.
At its peak, Conficker was reported to have infected a massive 15 million Windows machines worldwide.
Thats more than the entire population of a few countries.
3} Zeus
Zeus has been one persistent zombie to give headaches to the security companies.
Windows machines though being its primary target, it had versions that targeted other Operating Systems as well.
Zeus was taken down by the US Marshals working alongside its partners in 2012.
4} Flashback
All the attacks mentioned so far have targeted Windows machines primarily.
There has been a long standing belief that MacOS was beyond the reach of malware.
Flashback was a hard fall back to reality for Mac users.
This attack was specifically targeting Mac machines with the primary premise of generating revenue through ad clicks.
The attack has been abandoned because the attackers couldnt pass through anti-fraud systems.
Although, there are still plenty of infected machines, so you never know when another attack may emerge.
But the authors of this attack, seem to take the slow and steady approach.
They are amassing their army of infected machines slowly, thereby remaining undetected for quite some time.
And instead of Windows OS machines, this attack targeted Linux machines and that too mostly servers.
The authors didnt stop there, going on to attack a variety of systems, even the iPhone.
The one thing to learn from this, no machine is safe.
Apple used to boast about the fact that Macbooks never got infected by malware.
Check their recent ads, you will not find this claim anywhere.
source: www.techworm.net
