1 Million Chinese PCs Hijacked by Criminals

BOTNET : 1 Million Chinese PCs Hijacked by Criminals

FIRST told of Chinese PC hijack explosion

Frank Wintle

WEBWIRE

June 25, 2008

http://www.webwire.com/ViewPressRel.asp?aId=68776

VANCOUVER, CANADA, JUNE 25. The number of innocent individuals in China whose personal computers were hijacked by criminals rose by a staggering 2125 per cent between 2006 and 2007, delegates were told here today at the 20th annual conference of FIRST, the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams.

During sessions when the need for sophisticated approaches to combat the increasing sophistication of Internet crime rode high on the conference agenda, Dr Minghua Wang [MINGHUA WANG] who heads China’s Computer Emergency Response Team Co-ordination Centre, revealed that while the number of PC’s hijacked for remote Trojan hosting was already relatively high at 44,717 at the end of 2006, twelve months later the number had exploded to nearly a million – 995,154.

“Malicious websites have become a major threat to normal Internet users in China,” he said.

“We now have web-based Trojan networks, driven by economic profit and launched by experienced and well organised black hats, with hundreds of malicious hosts at different locations within China, and even abroad.

“We need co-operation between computer emergency response teams and law enforcers.”