"Bots don't create a lot of 'noise,'" he said, "but can still compromise a huge number of machines. We're not talking about hundreds of even thousands here, but millions of machines that have been compromised by various bots. We've seen bot networks that have 200,000 or even 400,000 nodes, and many of these bot networks overlap, so it's certainly possible that a system can be compromised -- and controlled -- by more than one bot maker."
In other news related to the unfolding Windows vulnerability story, Symantec on Wednesday back-pedaled from an assessment the day before that it had captured code exploiting a vulnerability in Windows implementation of SSL.
Although preliminary analysis concluded that a worm or bot was at work, Wednesday Symantec said that it made a mistake. Instead, it was seeing evidence of a new Trojan horse, dubbed Mipsiv, that was compromising systems, but using the same port, TCP port 443, as PCT.
Windows Protected Communications Technology (PCT) v. 1.0 is a packet protocol within Microsoft's SSL library, and like LSASS, is also vulnerable to attacks.
"When we received the code, and did preliminary analysis, we thought it had networking functions," said Oliver Friedrichs, a senior manager with the Symantec response team. "But it's really just a backdoor component."
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