Attackers are busy in building botnet with the help of pirated Windows 7 RC containing malware. As Eweek reports, researchers at Damballa got their hands on a trojan that was hidden inside pirated copies of Windows 7 RC and was distributed to P2P sites. Damballa was able to shut down the botnet’s command and control server successfully on May 10. However by that time,damage was already done and infection rates rose high at about 552 computers per hour.

Trojan did its dirty part by attempting to install malware on the infected machine. According to Damballa

We continue to see new installs happening at a rate of about 1,600 per day with broad geographic distribution. Since our takedown, any new installs of this pirated distribution of Windows 7 RC are inaccessible by the botmaster. The old installs are accessible. The countries with the largest percentage of installs are the U.S. (10 percent), Netherlands (7 percent) and Italy (7 percent).

So all those who have downloaded the Windows 7 RC from P2P sites, please consider downloading from Microsoft.