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By Byron Acohido and Jon Swartz, USA TODAY
SAN FRANCISCO — Surfing the Web has never been more risky.
Simply connecting to the Internet — and doing nothing else — exposes your PC to non-stop, automated break-in attempts by intruders looking to take control of your machine surreptitiously.
While most break-in tries fail, an unprotected PC can get hijacked within minutes of accessing the Internet. Once hijacked, it is likely to get grouped with other compromised PCs to dispense spam, conduct denial-of-service attacks or carry out identity-theft scams.
Those are key findings of a test conducted by USA TODAY and Avantgarde, a San Francisco tech marketing and design firm. The experiment involved monitoring six "honeypot" computers for two weeks — set up to see what kind of malicious traffic they would attract. Once breached, the test computers were shut down before they could be used to attack other PCs.
The test did not measure Web attacks that require user participation, namely spyware, which gets spread by visiting contagious Web sites, or e-mail viruses, which proliferate via e-mail attachments.
However, the results vividly illustrate how automated cyberattacks have come to saturate the Internet with malicious programs designed to take the quickest route to break into your PC: through security weaknesses in the PC operating system.
"It's a hostile environment out there," says tech security consultant Kevin Mitnick, who served five years in prison for breaking into corporate computer systems in the mid-1990s. "Attackers have become extremely indiscriminate."
Mitnick and Ryan Russell, an independent security researcher and author of Hack Proofing Your Network, were contracted by Avantgarde to set up and carry out the experiment.
SAN FRANCISCO — Surfing the Web has never been more risky.
Simply connecting to the Internet — and doing nothing else — exposes your PC to non-stop, automated break-in attempts by intruders looking to take control of your machine surreptitiously.
While most break-in tries fail, an unprotected PC can get hijacked within minutes of accessing the Internet. Once hijacked, it is likely to get grouped with other compromised PCs to dispense spam, conduct denial-of-service attacks or carry out identity-theft scams.
Those are key findings of a test conducted by USA TODAY and Avantgarde, a San Francisco tech marketing and design firm. The experiment involved monitoring six "honeypot" computers for two weeks — set up to see what kind of malicious traffic they would attract. Once breached, the test computers were shut down before they could be used to attack other PCs.
The test did not measure Web attacks that require user participation, namely spyware, which gets spread by visiting contagious Web sites, or e-mail viruses, which proliferate via e-mail attachments.
However, the results vividly illustrate how automated cyberattacks have come to saturate the Internet with malicious programs designed to take the quickest route to break into your PC: through security weaknesses in the PC operating system.
"It's a hostile environment out there," says tech security consultant Kevin Mitnick, who served five years in prison for breaking into corporate computer systems in the mid-1990s. "Attackers have become extremely indiscriminate."
Mitnick and Ryan Russell, an independent security researcher and author of Hack Proofing Your Network, were contracted by Avantgarde to set up and carry out the experiment.
Full report at http://www.usatoday....-honeypot_x.htm
beware of your system!
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