This article was published on March 12, 2009

BBC Hacks into Thousands of PC’s…to Prove a Point.


BBC Hacks into Thousands of PC’s…to Prove a Point.

picture-44To prove the power of ‘Botnets’, the BBC News Technology program ‘Click‘ deliberately hacked into 22,000 PC’s. With the help of security firm Prevx, they took over thousands the computers in an effort to highlight the increasingly serious security vulnerabilities of standard computers.

What are Botnets?

Botnets are compromised computers with parasites that lie dormant awaiting on commands to reproduce themselves, send get-rich-quick spam to the gullible, and launch DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks.

The tv program managed to prove their point by accessing the computers via users in chat rooms.

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The BBC have said,

“the programme did not access any personal information on the infected PCs and its botnet was destroyed after finishing the experiment”

A Fix?

Unfortunately, though there are tools out there to detect botnet attacks and can shut them down – it really isn’t straight forward. The ideal long term solution would be to remove the money companies can earn from the business. Fine anyone who advertises their products in spam, malware, emails etc..Make them pay extortionate amounts for it, lose any profits they could have made or potentially make and eventually the problem will go away.

via TechRadar

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