This NY Times article talks about how a gang in a Russian town is using Microsoft administrative tools to infect private and government computers. A few excerpts:
The gang was identified publicly in May by Joe Stewart, director of malware research at SecureWorks, a computer security firm in Atlanta. Mr. Stewart, who has determined that the gang is based in Russia, was able to locate a central program controlling as many as 100,000 infected computers across the Internet.
The system infects PCs with a program known as Coreflood that records keystrokes and steals other information.
“The great thing about this system is that from one computer it is possible to push out updates to all machines in a corporate network at once,” Mr. Stewart said. “This is a useful tool that Microsoft has provided. However, the bad guys said, ‘We’ll just use it to roll out our Trojan to every machine in the network.’ ”
The gang then uses the passwords to access your bank account and transfer out money. Scary stuff.
This only affects Microsoft operating systems, so Macs are safe. In order to protect PCs, I suggest using:
- hardware firewall (included in routers)
- Windows Vista or XP with Service Pack 3 (latest)
- Anti-virus software such as AVG Free or Avast.
If you get infected by something like this Coreflood virus, you should do a complete re-install of your system.