More Net Attacks Loom, CERT Says

The recent rash of Internet worms has produced an army of hundreds of thousands of compromised machines that could ultimately be used to launch a massive distributed-denial-of-service attack at any time, according to security officials.

Officials at the CERT Coordination Center said the organization is monitoring at least five large networks of compromised machines installed with so-called bots. The bots connect compromised PCs or servers to Internet Relay Chat servers, which attackers commonly use to execute commands on the remote systems. At least one of these networks has more than 140,000 machines, officials said.

"We have seen indications that these networks are being used [for attacks]," said Marty Lindner, team leader for incident handling at the CERT center at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh. "The potential is there for them to cause serious long-term damage."

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