Traveling in Sydney, Canberra, and Melbourne this week, I’ve had opportunity to work with many local integrators, IBM, Cisco, HP, and local telcos on their security strategy.  It’s a global issue, and for those on the selling side, a global opportunity.  One workshop attendee passed on this attached article offering some insights and new sound bites on how powerful some of these botnets really are:

http://www.itnews.com.au/News/102493,researchers-hijack-torpig-botnet.aspx

Here are some highlights:

“In that time (10 days of observation), researchers estimate that they (the botnet under observation) collected some 70GB worth of uploaded information from roughly 180,000 infected machines. The harvested information included bank details and system information”.

“The researchers also found that Torpig (this botnet we’re talking about in this article) collects far more than just bank and credit card details. Data uploaded to the command server included user login credentials and email account data, suggesting that the botnet could also be used for spamming runs”.