Home Messages Index
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]
Author IndexDate IndexThread Index

Re: [News] [Rival] Police Chasing Tiny Portions of 320,000,000 Windows Zombie

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

____/ Mark Kent on Monday 04 August 2008 12:43 : \____

> Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
>> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>> Hash: SHA1
>> 
>> ____/ TomB on Monday 04 August 2008 11:35 : \____
>> 
>>> On 2008-08-04, Mark Kent wrote:
>>>> TomB <tommy.bongaerts@xxxxxxxxx> espoused:
>>>>> On 2008-08-04, Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>>>| USA TODAY REPORTS that on an average day, 40 per cent of the 800
>>>>>>| million computers connected to the Internet are bots used to send out
>>>>>>| spam, viruses and to mine for sensitive personal data.
>>>>> 
>>>>> 800 million computers? At 1% that means about 8 million computers
>>>>> runnig GNU/Linux - which btw are among the not infected ones.
>>>>> 
>>>>> I'd say that's a pretty big user base for an "hobby" OS :-)
>>>>> 
>>>>
>>>> Interesting observation...  as mobility devices and appliances grow, so
>>>> those numbers will rise.  In fact, I suspect that the 800 mio number
>>>> above ignores most appliances.
>>>>
>>> 
>>> What strikes me most is the sheer number of "zombie" computers, of
>>> which most are probably Windows systems. Fourty freaking percent?
>>> About 320 mio computers sending out spam and the likes? That's just
>>> plain terrible. I'm so glad GNU/Linux "forces" me to be at least a bit
>>> tech-savvy; at least *I* know what's coming in and going out of my
>>> computers...
>>> 
>> On a daily basis, according to one source, 10 million are used to SPAM (not
>> enough people to operate all) and they keep moving from one group of 10 or
>> so million to another... so it's like half of the world's PCs are a pool to
>> pick from. There's hardly a way to ever cure this.
>> 
>> See this from 2004:
>> 
>> Home PCs hijacked to spread spam
>> 
>> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/technology/3528810.stm
>> 
>> There's reportedly a drop in the number of zombies over Xmas when people
>> find the time to "wipe and reinstall" or receive a new PC.
>> 
> 
> Presumably, of all of those which have been compromised, only a
> relatively small proportion will be truly usable at any time.  Many will
> be behind firewalls of some kind, perhaps even on corporate networks,
> many will be rarely used, so only available for perhaps very short
> periods.  Many will be on narrow bandwidth links, thus reducing their
> effectiveness for major spamming and re-infection;  many might be
> connected to ISPs which look for particular traffic and drop it.
> 
> Further, a large number will be held "in reserve" for later
> exploitation, on the basis that there must be some kind of clean-up rate
> for these things too, at least on corporate and government connections,
> anyway.
> 
> Even so, the numbers remain mind-bogglingly large, beyond any real
> possibility of imagining.

Many people are apathetic to this. Just the other day, a friend told me that he
had caught many viruses while surfing the Web (he said it was pr0n sites). He
doesn't seem to care much, nor to bother to clean up his machine that's just a
zombie now (assuming he's right). And that's the story of almost 1 in 2
machines. A few months after this report from USA Today it might be more
like "most PCs" (>50%).

- -- 
                ~~ Best of wishes

Roy S. Schestowitz      |    Windows XP: Dude, where's my RAM?
http://Schestowitz.com  |  RHAT GNU/Linux   |     PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
         run-level 5  Jul 21 13:57                   last=S
      http://iuron.com - help build a non-profit search engine
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)

iEYEARECAAYFAkiXF0cACgkQU4xAY3RXLo6bOQCfUkD/fEcuQw1GAGSOtnjupD/p
tSUAn2Lv/oXsVpbwkVLpsEKhYGpLtdHM
=cM+z
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]
Author IndexDate IndexThread Index