Error MS06-040 made the number of zombies increase

The emergence of malicious code that attacks users through a new security flaw published in Windows is the cause of a significant increase in the number of abducted PCs.

Yesterday, security firm CipherTrust announced a report saying that the number of "kidnapped" PCs - or zombies - has increased by 23%.

According to CipherTrust, the main reason for the dramatic increase in the number of 'abducted' PCs is the widespread distribution of Mocbot computer worm variants. Mocbot is also known by other names such as Cuebot and Graweg mainly targeting the security bug MS06-040 released by Microsoft in the August security update.

' Since August 13, we have begun to record an increase in the number of new Zombies ,' said Dmitri Alperovitch - researcher of CipherTrust -. ' The average increase in new Zombie numbers has reached 265,000 per day. Earlier that number only stood at 214,000 a day . '

Any PC infected with Mocbot worm will become part of the botne network - a network of PCs that are 'kidnapped'. This network system can be remotely controlled for spamming purposes of hackers.

In June, Microsoft also once warned of the threat coming from growing botnets and zombies.

CipherTrust said it could when it received an increase in zombies being used to make spam bots by comparing the number of spam messages sent from systems that CipherTrust already knew were computer worms. 'kidnap' with the amount of spam sent from new zombie systems.

Alperovitch expert estimates that between 500,000 and 1 million PC systems have been 'kidnapped'. Consequently, spam also flooded the Internet and the number of spam has increased by more than 81% in the past week.

Experts warn users to be really careful and should regularly upgrade security software and install patches.

Hoang Dung