DoS Attacks Uses Web Servers As Zombies
According to latest news reports it has been discovered that a botnet uses compromised Web servers, as opposed to 
the usual personal computers in order to launch denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. A security company named Imperva uncovered a botnet of over 300 web servers after one of its servers was used in a certain attack which was based on a search of attack code from Google.
According to Amachai Shulman who is the chief technology officer at Imperva:”Web servers were commonly used in such attacks a decade ago but had been replaced by the more ubiquitous Windows-based PCs”.He saw that there were actually two web servers who were targeting an unnamed hosting provider. This was based in the Netherlands. The hosting provider was fully aware of what was going on.
He claims:”Instead of using 50 personal computers you can use a single server,” he said. “To some extent, it’s easier to maintain this kind of attack because there are fewer computers (involved) and there’s less of a chance for the (attack) code to be detected.”
The thing is that many Dos Attacks are being used in order to get money out of web site owners; this is one of the motives of these attacks. He then claimed:”It appeared that the Web servers were being compromised with code that exploits a vulnerability in PHP, a computer language used for processing Web pages, and it can affect servers running Apache, Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS), or other server software.
At the end of the day this is very fascinating and we all need to be aware of what is going on out there. As an individual computer user it is going to be within your best interest to take security seriously and always make sure that you have up to date software running on your machine. In this day and age it is imperative that you are aware of the risks involved and don’t take any chances.
