Are chinese Zombies Lurking On Your Computer?

[EV_Ares]

First it was pet food, then it was lead paint on toys, but the latest toxic import from China might be more dangerous than both of those incidents — computer zombies that inhabit the computers of unsuspecting Americans. The U.S. government knows about it, but will not officially accuse the Chinese.

As of the morning of Sept. 14, there were exactly 735,598 computers in the United States infested by Chinese zombies.The wave of cyberprobes or cyberattacks against Pentagon networks and government computer systems in France, Germany, New Zealand and the United Kingdom this summer appears to emanate from China, but no one in authority in the Defense Department or any of the other countries that have been victimized seems willing to finger the Chinese government or military as the culprit.

Paul Strassmann — who served as director of Defense information in the early 1990s, the acting chief information officer of NASA from 2002 to 2003, and now serves as a Defense senior adviser — declines to point fingers, either. He prefers, instead, to focus on one startling fact about Chinese activity in cyberspace: As of the morning of Sept. 14, there were exactly (remember, Strassmann is an engineer and likes precision) 735,598 computers in the United States infested by Chinese zombies, he said. Zombies are those small programs that infect computers at the root level and allow the computers to be controlled by remote users.

“This is a fact that should get everyone’s attention,” Strassmann said. Those zombie computers can launch massive denial-of-service attacks, spewing 1,000 messages a second against target computers, he said.

The ostensible purpose of harboring these malicious little programs on U.S. computers would be to use them in denial-of-service attacks against Defense Department computer networks:

Defense experiences millions of cyberscans of the Global Information Grid every day, according to an internal talking paper it prepared in response to news reports this month that China had successfully attacked Pentagon computer systems, including those used by the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

(Entire Article @ Following Link)

http://www.pensitoreview.com/2007/09/17/are-chinese-zombies-lurking-on-your-computer/

[porphyrian]

1. Don't drink the orange soda!

[Ian David]

2. Would un-installing our firewall programs end the war? n/t

[Recursion]

3. Anything to keep you Windoze users offline

Seriously, it just strengthens our computational gene pool.

[smirkymonkey]

4. No, but they sneak in my room at night and steal my underwear.