Are you one of the millions who’s been infected by a bot?
If you have, the FBI wants to hear about it.
The agency has recently launched “Operation Bot Roast” to coordinate and bring more visibility to their efforts to dismantle botnets. As part of the effort, they’re trying to get people who have been infected with bots to file a complaint through their Web site. If you know that you’ve been infected, please go and file a complaint report. Every report helps identify these criminals and bolster the case against them.
(An anti-phishing reminder: The FBI will not contact you online and request your personal information–you must go to them to make the report.)
So if you’ve been infected, you can do your part to make the net a safer place!
July 3rd, 2007 at 8:00 pm
It’s good to hear reports like this. However, here is a sad thing. To file a complaint you have to be a victim. But the real victim may not know yet his/her computer is a part of a botnet and this computer is actively used to steal other’s ids, i.e. creates more victims. Then it may get too late to react on this piece of a botnet.
July 5th, 2007 at 10:07 am
That’s supposed to be one of the purposes of Operation Bot Roast - they had identified 1 million infected machines, and are in the process of trying to contact those users to let them know they’re infected.
This will probably not catch 100% of infected users, nor will they necessarily be able to contact 100% of the users that they do identify, but it’s certainly a worthwhile effort. It’s assumed that most, if not all, infected users don’t know they’re currently infected.
What I think even more people don’t realize, is that once they do identify the infection, it’s important to also report these cybercrimes. I don’t think people think of things like bot infections as actual crimes yet - just as computer-annoyances. They are far more serious than that, and each one of us has a job to do in preventing crime.