A Brief History of Cybercrime and Cyberwarfare - The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering - page 388

tivirus software packages can prevent them, but there is a constant race between
attackers and defenders.
The origin of botnets is ambiguous, but they were found in 2004 and possibly
before. Some of the more famous botnet attacks are named for the offending soft-
ware: Conficker and Mariposa in 2008; Zeus in 2010; Bagle in 2004.
In total, there have probably been several hundred specific malicious bot soft-
ware packages created, and the total number of computers impacted appears to be
hundreds of millions.
As an example of the damages done by botnets, consider the Conficker attacks
in 2008 and 2009:
• In January 2009, a French naval network was invaded and a number of
aircraft were grounded for several days.
• Soon after, the British Ministry of Defense reported a Conficker attack
that affected several ships and also grounded aircraft for several days.
• The British city of Sheffield reported a Conficker attack against hospitals
and government installations that affected about 800 computers.
• The British city of Manchester reported a Conficker attack, possibly
caused by the use of a thumb drive, on government computers in February
2009.
• In March 2009, computers used by the House of Commons in the British
Parliament were affected by Conficker.
As can be seen from the significance of the victims, this was a very sophist-
icated attack with substantial self-defense mechanisms to prevent removal. The
Conficker package was able to invade computer networks with serious profession-
al firewalls and protection. Five variants of the Conficker botnet software package
were identified and called Conficker A, B, C, D, and E. Later, other variants were
found.
In February 2009, Microsoft formed an international working group with a
dozen or more organizations to help prevent Conficker attacks and speed up the
removal and cure for infected computers.
At least one of the variants was traced to Ukraine. The origins of other variants
are either ambiguous or not yet published. Botnets pose a serious ongoing threat to
home computers, corporate computers, government computers, and military com-
puters.