eWee: Money Bots: Hackers Cash In on Hijacked PCs
Botnet hunters tracking the latest MS06-040 worm attack estimate that one malicious hacker earned about $430 in a single day by installing spyware programs on thousands of commandeered Windows machines.
Security researchers are the German Honeynet Project discovered a direct link between the botnet-building attack and DollarRevenue, a company that pays between a penny and 30 cents per installation of its heavily criticized ad-serving software.
Within 24 hours, the IRC-controlled botnet hijacked more than 7,700 machines via the Windows Server Service vulnerability and hosed the infected computers with the noxious DollarRevenue files.
During a four-day stretch, researchers at the Manheimm, Germany, honeynet project counted about 9,700 infections from a single command-and-control center and calculated that the attacker was making hundreds of dollars a day in commissions from DollarRevenue alone. [Read more]