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Huge Security Breaches Discovered
Posted on Feb 18, 2010 by Tom Fragala
Computerword is reportingSecurity researchers at a company called NetWitness Corp. have unearthed a massive botnet affecting at least 75,000 computers at 2,500 companies and government agencies worldwide.
The Kneber botnet, named for the username linking the affected machines worldwide, has been used to gather login credentials to online financial systems, social networking sites and e-mail systems for the past 18 months, according to NetWitness.
A 75GB cache of stolen data discovered by NetWitness included 68,000 corporate login credentials, login data for user accounts at Facebook, Yahoo and Hotmail, 2,000 SSL certificate files and a large amount of highly detailed "dossier-level" identity information. In addition, systems compromised by the botnet also give attackers remote access inside the compromised network, the company said.
"Disturbingly, the data was only a one-month snapshot of data from a campaign that has been in operation for more than a year," NetWitness said in a statement announcing the discovery of the botnet late yesterday
My reading of this is that these breaches are much bigger and worse than they've even discovered so far. And this is the new normal we can expect for some time. Huge amounts of attacks and breaches going after corporate and government secrets originating from criminal gangs or governments.
More from the Wall Street Journal.
Filed under: Data Breach
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