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Re: Daily Fact: Windows Zombie Spam

  • Subject: Re: Daily Fact: Windows Zombie Spam
  • From: Kelsey Bjarnason <kbjarnason@xxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Thu, 11 May 2006 17:57:41 -0700
  • Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
  • Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com
  • References: <4234694.IcjPMqyZEv@schestowitz.com> <1147387387.148088.57820@y43g2000cwc.googlegroups.com>
  • User-agent: Pan/0.14.2.91 (As She Crawled Across the Table (Debian GNU/Linux))
  • Xref: news.mcc.ac.uk comp.os.linux.advocacy:1108345
[snips]

On Thu, 11 May 2006 15:43:07 -0700, Kavoorka wrote:

>> As per Symatec: Zombie PCs spew out 80% of spam
>>
>>         http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/04/trojan_spam_study/
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Conclusion: roughly half of the world's E-mail /traffic/ is delivered from
>> Windows zombies. Thank you, Microsoft. I think I'll go purge some spam now.
> 
> 
> BAAAWAAAAHHHHH.
> 
> Windows sends rougly half the worlds email traffic. So 90% of the
> worlds PC's are sending 50% of the trafic. This means that you're
> crappy lintard os that makes up 3% of the worlds pc's sends the other
> 50%.

I realize that thinking isn't your strong suit, so I'll have to do it for
you.  The statement is not that Windows is sending half the traffic, but,
rather, that Windows _zombies_ are sending half the traffic.

Since even the most outrageous estimates of Windows zombies don't come
anywhere near 100% of Windows machines running them, in fact the high end
estimates are about 10%, this leaves fully 90% of the Windows boxes
available to be delivering spam by means _other_ than zombies - plus of
course, other systems such as Linux or OSX.

What's interesting, though, is this.  About 10% of Windows boxes account
for half the emails.  By your number, everything which isn't Windows
amounts to about 10% of PCs; meaning that "everything else" numbers about
the same as Windows zombies.

If we estimate that, of non-Windows systems, only about 10% are
compromised - i.e. about the same rate as the Windows systems - then we
are forced to conclude that a group of machines amounting to some 1% of
the PC machine base are responsible for some 50% of the emails - a feat
which requires ten times as many Windows boxes to accomplish.

Just goes to show, Windows can't even do something as basic as sending
emails efficiently.  Pretty sad.  Although we should be glad it can't,
since if it did manage it, those zombies would be completely flooding the
net in spam.



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