Turf war erupts as hackers send viruses to hijack PCs

Turf war erupts as hackers send viruses to hijack PCs

Richard Wray
Thursday August 18, 2005
The Guardian

A turf war has erupted on the internet between competing hackers trying to hijack computers running Microsoft's Windows 2000 operating system to turn them into "zombie PCs".
Variants of a "worm" that installs itself on computers connected to the internet so they can be accessed by hackers to send spam or disrupt networks hit several high-profile US companies early on Wednesday morning.
US broadcasting networks ABC and CNN were affected as well as the New York Times and Californian bulldozer manufacturer Caterpillar.



This side of the Atlantic, printing of Tuesday's edition of the Financial Times was also affected as systems went haywire.
Patrick Runald, senior anti-virus consultant at Finnish software security specialist F-Secure said the worms, also known as bots, are part of a new and growing trend among hackers to create zombie PCs. These infected computers can be controlled by hackers, and their computing power sold to the highest bidder for illicit purposes such as sending spam or directing network attacks.
"Over the last 18 months or so the virus writing world has changed. In the past, people just wanted to disrupt a lot of machines because it was fun. Now it is about making money, where people try and infect a lot of machines and make them into zombies," he said.
The current set of worms has been developed to take advantage of a vulnerability within Windows 2000 that Microsoft made public last week. While most home users still use Windows 98 or have switched to XP, analysts reckon half of corporations with more than 250 computers still run Windows 2000.
With IT professionals racing to patch the hole in Windows 2000's "plug and play" hardware recognition feature, hackers have to move fast to take advantage of the situation. This has led some hackers to create worms that kill other worms that may already have infected a PC.
"Essentially, we have a bot war going on," said Mr Runald. "There is a small window of opportunity from now until the majority of PCs are patched when hackers can turn them into zombies."
Even when patched, an infected PC will remain infected and users will have to install anti-virus software such as that available free on f-secure.com to remove the worms.