UTA Prof.: Kneber botnet a new sort of stealth computer virus

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Businesses and government agencies have a new weapon to fear -- one that is stealthy, secretive and can steal secrets without easy detection, said Matthew Wright, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington.

A new generation of computer viruses have been born, according to Wright. This threat was furthered this week when news broke that Herndon-based NetWitness identified a virus, dubbed the Kneber botnet, that was able to affect up to 75,000 systems in 2,500 organizations worldwide.

“I think it’s very likely there are additional businesses that are affected, and they don’t know about it,” said Wright.

Based on NetWitness’ research, the new virus is able to gather log-in credentials for financial systems, social networking sites and e-mail systems from infected computers.

The source is hard to detect, Wright said.

He added that the creators of the new virus have essentially tied two types of malware, or negative software, together and created a system that allows all of the affected computers to talk to each other.

Wright said businesses should consider meeting with their security vendors or IT security groups to discuss handling or preventing these types of attacks. But don’t expect an ominous sign when your system has been hit.

“This is not going to take down your computers or cause trouble in any way,” he said. “It is going to stay low and quiet. The original goal is to steal online banking credentials.”

Wright said this new threat is real and even has the American government concerned.

“We’ve been seeing this trend over the past decade,” he said. “Hacking and virus-writing has gone from kids messing around with computers to pure criminalization. This is becoming a true criminal enterprise,” he said.

And what does the new generation of hackers want from companies?

“I don’t want to speculate too much," Wright said, “but any corporate secrets, technology that is going to be developed … anything about company projects.”

He added that the incentive for this information would be a criminal’s impetus to sell that information to competitors.

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