Let’s Declare War On Botnets!

The SANS Institute (via ZDNet Australia) recently reported: “Millions of Blogs Inaccessible Due to DDoS Attack.”

A “massive” distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on Six Apart’s blogging services and corporate Web site left about 10 million LiveJournal and TypePad blogs unreachable for hours on Tuesday, May 2. Six Apart plans to report the attack to authorities…

Once again the crackers - criminal hackers - have managed to wreak havoc. It doesn’t appear to be profit motivated this time, just malicious, but once again it proves that the average computer user is mostly clueless when it comes to security; how else could a botnet of sufficient proportion to mount such an attack be assembled?

The average home user will happily open emails from virtually anyone, gleefully clicking on the embedded links, perhaps even believing that the “nice gentleman from Nigeria” really does need some help. And when faced with a popup message that says “do you want to install the Active-X control ‘anonymous keystroke logger’ well, yes, of course he does! Not to mention that an email with the subject “Hey, Bro, found this site” just HAS to be from someone who is trustworthy. Certainly his “friends” on Kazaa would never think of sending a malicious file to him…

We need to declare war on botnets. People need to take some responsibility and stop treating their PCs like TVs or fancy stereos and realize that while the PC is on and connected to the Internet, it is potentially accessible to any other device out there; that without proper protection, it can be easily compromised and used by criminals for nefarious purposes.

The primary and most easily fired weapon in this war? The user’s index finger. Firing instructions: 1. Click Start; 2. Click Shutdown; 3. Click OK; 4. (optional) Use finger to turn off power to the computer. It can’t be exploited if it isn’t online. It takes no thinking and little effort to just turn the thing off when you aren’t using it. That action alone would put a big dent into the number of computers available.

Wouldn’t it?

[tags]security,trojan,hack,botnet,cracker,security solution[/tags]