In less than one hour last Thursday, Internet security journalist Elinor Mills mastered the tools of the hacker trade at McAfee’s Malware Experience event.
It takes “as little as $300 to infect several Windows clients and take complete control of them in a test environment,” Mills reports. By using real samples of malicious code, she was able to infect PCs with a Sub Seven Trojan and gain remote access to the machines. Once inside the computers, she was exposed to some of the malicious tricks hackers can play on unsuspecting malware victims.
- Invert the users screen so images and text appear upside down
- Change background colors
- Direct the PCs browser to any URL
- Control webcams, chat sessions, and printers
After mastering the Sub Seven Trojan’s “mildly malicious” features and functions, Ms. Mills was ready for the big leagues. With a few simple keystrokes, she created a botnet to control multiple zombies and do things like shut down websites with a DOS attack, send spam, scan ports, and install malicious files and keystroke loggers on multiple PCs.
McAfee’s Avert Labs participated in the event and reported to participants that there are 400,000+ new zombies deployed and 4,000+ new pieces of malware discovered daily that result in over 1.5MM malicious website attacks every month.
Ms. Mills wrapped up the McAfee Malware Experience by saying, “The numbers aren’t all that surprising to me now that I’ve seen first hand how easy the malware is to create and use. All in all, I’d say it was a very sobering experience.”
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 at 9:00 am and is filed under Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
