Zombies Control Half of Windows PCs

Software giant Microsoft has crowned the “zombie” PC the greatest threat to Windows users.

Of the many forms of attacks uncovered during the first half of 2006, the company said backdoor Trojans which take control of infected computers can be found in almost one out of every two Windows-based systems.

“Attackers, with financial gain in mind, are clearly concentrating a significant amount of development focus on this category of malware,” according to Microsoft’s Security Intelligence Report, which covers January through June.

The results were gathered from use of the software maker’s Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT).

More than 43,000 new versions of the malicious software were found making Trojans that turn PCs into cash cows for hackers “the most active category of malware,” according to the report.

The news comes as a 32-year old Florida man was charged with using an army of bots to launch a distributed denial of service [DDOS] attack against Akamai Technologies.

Of the 4 million Windows machines that used the MSRT, nearly 2 million contained at least one backdoor Trojan.

Full article: internetnews.com