June 15, 2007: The American FBI revealed that it
has gone out and tried to count the number of PCs that have been taken over by
criminals for use in computer crime (spamming. DDOS attacks to shut down web
sites, etc) or Cyber War activities (like the current Chinese attacks against
U.S. miilitary networks). Operation Bot Roast has, so far, identified over a
million compromised PCs. The FBI is trying to get in touch with as many of these
computer users as possible, and direct them to organizations and companies that
can help them clean the zombie software out of their computers. Help can be had
for free, although many of the compromised PCs were found to be clogged with
all manner of malware (illegal software hidden on your machine to feed you ads
or simply track what you do). Most owners of zombiefied computers didn't even
realize their PCs had been taken over. Some with heavily infected
machines, do notice that the malware
slows down the PC, and there have been cases where the user just went out and
bought a new computer. Usually, reformatting the hard drive and reinstalling
your software works, and is a lot cheaper. But most computer users today don't
know how to reformat a hard drive, or even get someone to do it for them.
Operation Bot Roast only collected the IP (Internet
Protocol) addresses of the compromised PCs. The IP address is the "mailing
address" every PC must have when it is connected to the Internet. These
addresses are distributed to ISPs (Internet Service Providers), who assign them
to PCs that they connect to the Internet. Anyone can go to a site like
http://www.ip-adress.com/ to find out which ISP controls which IP address. The
FBI is contacting the ISPs, and asking them to contact their customers,
preferably via the mail, who were using the infected IP addresses at the time
the FBI discovered that IP address to be operating from a zombie PC.
The FBI also identified the operators of many
botnet (networks of zombie PCs) operators, has arrested some, and is pursuing
many others. To avoid the FBI, many botherders (those who operate botnets) are
overseas, often in countries without an extradition treaty with the United
States. Criminal gangs are increasingly active in this area, and, in the case
of China, so are government Cyber War operations. The FBI did not comment on
the Cyber War revelations of Operation Bot Roast, but they must have been
substantial, and something the FBI and CIA are busy exploiting.
