A suspicious software program has been discovered to infect the computers of more than 2,500 corporations around the globe. This is according to NetWitness, a reputable computer network security firm.

Two Chinese Schools were said to got connected to Online Attacks in February 19, 2010. The spyware, or botnet, was said to command the operating systems of both residential and corporate computing systems. The botnets are used by hackers for a a wide array of prohibited online activities, including sending spams and stealing digital documents, and also pilfering passwords from infected computers. Such hackers usually install the so-called keystroke loggers to capture personal information.

The recent virus, nonetheless, was modest compared with the other known botnets. A system known as Conficker in 2008, for example, infected as many as 15 million computers at its peak and continues to contaminate more than seven million systems today.

We can only hear about Botnet attacks seasonally. Currently Shadowserver, an organization that tracks botnet activity, yield to 5,900 separate botnets.

Quite a few computer security experts raise a dispute relating to the company’s assertion that the botnet was a novel discovery. Such type of infection is well known to the computer security research community and is regularly tracked by a monitoring system, identifying more than 1,300 botnets of this design.

NetWitness say that it had discovered the program last month while the company was installing monitoring systems. The company labelled it as Kneber botnet, relating to a username that linked the infected systems.

The goal of the virus is to gather login credentials to social networking sites, online financial systems, and e-mail systems. From then, it will transmit that information to the system’s controllers.

As the investigation goes on, it has been determined that the botnet has compromised both commercial and government systems, including 68,000 corporate login credentials. Access to online banking accounts, e-mail systems, social network credentials were hacked along with more than 2,000 digital security certificates. This is also set along with significant identity thefts.

“Cyber criminal elements, like the Kneber crew, quietly and diligently target and compromise thousands of government and commercial organizations across the globe.”

“These large-scale compromises of enterprise networks have reached epidemic levels,” said Amit Yoran, chief executive of NetWitness and former director of the National Cyber Security Division of the Department of Homeland Security.

The company based in Herndon, Va., say that the new botnet made sophisticated use of a well-known Trojan Horse, which is a backdoor entryway to attack. This is what has been identified as ZeuS before.

“Many security analysts tend to classify ZeuS solely as a Trojan that steals banking information,” Alex Cox said. Cox is the principal analyst at NetWitness who investigates on Kneber botnet.

Cox said that such viewpoint is naïve. When they began to detect the correlation among both the methodology, which were used by the Kneber crew to attack victim machines and the wide variety of data sets harvested, the security teams needed to rethink their entire perspective on advanced threats such as ZeuS.

It has been discovered that about half of the machines infected with the Kneber botnet were previously infected by an earlier botnet known as Waledec.