Is the Internet Infected (CBS 60 minutes)

In this 60 Minutes edition, Lesley Stahl describes how malicious hackers are using worms such as Conficker to penetrate into millions of vulnerable computers worldwide and make them into "zombies". These Zombies can then be used to either steal sensitive information such as banking passwords, email accounts  or to send spam and launch Distributed Denial of Service attacks. The approximate 12 minute coverage consists of interviews - with victims who had their passwords lost and bank accounts hijacked, then Symantec's vice president Steve Trilling demonstrates how malaware can monitor each and every keystroke on a victim's computer and send it back to it's author.

The funny part was that in the latter part of the story Lesley interviewed Don Jackson from SecureWorks and he showed a photograph of supposed Russian hackers who were championed by local newspapers for having looted the "rich Americans". Later, it was found that the picture was actually a fake :D and those poor kids were not by any chance malicious hackers :D

Quote from CBS: "A correction: 60 Minutes made a mistake in using a photograph in our story called "The Internet is Infected." The picture was described in the story as a group of young Russian computer hackers which was inaccurate. The picture, provided to us by an Internet security company, had appeared on a Russian hacker magazine Web site. ".

Vivek Ramachandran is a security evangelist and has been working in computer security related fields for the past 7 years. In 2007, Vivek spoke at world renowned conferences Defcon (WEP Cloaking Exposed) and Toorcon (The Caffe Latte Attack). The discovery of the Caffe Latte Attack was covered by CBS5 news, BBC online, Network World etc news agencies.In 2006, Vivek was announced as one of winners of the Microsoft Security Shootout contest held in India among 65,000 participants. He has also been a recipient of a Team Achievement at Cisco Systems for his work on 802.1x and Port Security modules on the Catalyst 6500 switches. Currently he spends all of his time maintaining Security- Freak.Net , SecurityTube.Net and is the co-founder of Axonize. Vivek, is a Bachelor in Electronics and Communications Engineering from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati.You can contact him at vivek[at]securitytube.net