Machine Wars
The battle between good and evil in cyberspace is increasingly fought with automated tools
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Welcome to the machine wars, where zombie armies--computers compromised and subverted by hackers--churn out spam and malicious code in relentless raids on the PCs of home users and the commercial world's IT systems. Spammers are bypassing similar image-recognition challenges, used by Internet service providers to prevent bulk registration of E-mail accounts, with scripts that trick Web surfers into solving picture puzzles for them. And 24 hours a day, bots search the Net for vulnerable systems.
Last year, a computer worm that conducts automated reconnaissance appeared; it uses the Google Inc. search engine to automatically find Web sites running vulnerable bulletin-board software and then defaces them. The financial-services industry noticed a spike last fall in phishing attempts to steal money from customers' accounts and put the blame on a new toolkit that made it easier to set up such scams.
The good guys are fighting back. One means is through better blocking of spam, the river on which many automated attacks travel. Another is turning the network itself into a security device. AT&T, the largest carrier of IP data nationally, each day analyzes 1.7 petabytes of information that passes through its IP backbone, looking for new attacks so it can teach its network to spot and combat them through proprietary algorithms without human intervention.
These are only exerpts from InformationWeek's exclusive article written by Thomas Claburn.
Last year, a computer worm that conducts automated reconnaissance appeared; it uses the Google Inc. search engine to automatically find Web sites running vulnerable bulletin-board software and then defaces them. The financial-services industry noticed a spike last fall in phishing attempts to steal money from customers' accounts and put the blame on a new toolkit that made it easier to set up such scams.
The good guys are fighting back. One means is through better blocking of spam, the river on which many automated attacks travel. Another is turning the network itself into a security device. AT&T, the largest carrier of IP data nationally, each day analyzes 1.7 petabytes of information that passes through its IP backbone, looking for new attacks so it can teach its network to spot and combat them through proprietary algorithms without human intervention.
These are only exerpts from InformationWeek's exclusive article written by Thomas Claburn.
