Botnets – Are You One?

This post was written by admin on January 17, 2009
Posted Under: Botnets, PC Security, Technology

Is your computer a botnet? Maybe you don’t know as your antivirus and antimalware scans are clean.

A ‘botnet’ is a number of computers connected to the internet that have been set up to forward transmissions including spam or viruses to other computers on the internet, although the users are unaware of this.

Home users account for 95% of all attacks mounted by botnets not only sending spam but also harvesting private data from infected machines, and can also be used to redirect transmissions to a specific computer, such as a Web site or server that can be closed down by having to handle too much traffic, a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack as well as host phishing sites and other illegal content.

Many ‘bots’ are downloaded silently in the background, purely by visiting an infected site, having firewall ports open or inadequate protection.

Many users are unaware that they are infected, but there is a free program from Trend Micro called RUBotted, and once downloaded and installed it sits in the taskbar and monitors all traffic and will warn you when your system has been compromised.

To test this software I disabled protection on my test machine, visited a site and was instantly infected and this program informed me of this. I was infected with OTORUN9 and OTORUN5. These are both Trojans, a Downloader and a Backdoor.

A Downloader is a Trojan which downloads and installs new malware or adware on victims machine. It then launches the new malware or registers it to enable autorun without the knowledge or consent of the user.

Backdoors are the most dangerous type of Trojans and are remote administration utilities. Backdoors are used by to detect and download confidential information, execute malicious code, destroy data, and again are downloaded without the user’s knowledge.

Ideally, after installation the program should be run, it takes about 1 second on my computer so it’s a superfast program with a tiny footprint.

Please note:
If a Botnet is found I would suggest that you close all browsers, clear your cache, click on RUBotted, click View Log and then click Delete to avoid false positives, then re-run the program.

If you are infected you will be prompted to run Housecall, which will remove the infections from your computer for free. Scans can take between 1 and 3 hours depending on the size of your hard drive, so choose a time when you will not be needing to use your machine for a while.

After scans and any infection is removed, open the RUBotted program from the Taskbar, click on ‘View Log’ and Delete the contents, then click ‘Back’ and it should show a green checkmark.

Download RUBotted here

System Requirements:
Wind 2000 Pro
WinXP Pro / Home
Win2003 Server
Windows Vista -- 32-bit only
All require an active internet connection and all should be updated with the latest MS Patches.

This program will NOT work with Panda Internet Security 2008.