The battle against the botnet hordes
,----[ Quote ]
| Typically owners of machines forming a botnet do not know their computer has
| been hijacked. Home users account for 95% of all attacks mounted by botnet,
| according to figures from security firm Symantec.
|
| [...]
|
| DC Burls spends most of his time breaking the botnets, "They are complex
| investigations they're very time consuming, they cross international
| boundaries but we are making progress, they're very satisfying when you get a
| suspect before a court"
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7256501.stm
That's tax money lost to Windows problems, never mind DDOS attacks and SPAM.
Related:
In zombies we trust
,----[ Quote ]
| A little over a year ago, I wrote an editorial where in back-of-the-envelope
| style (.pdf) I estimated that perhaps 15-30% of all privately owned computers
| were no longer under the sole control of their owner. In the intervening
| months, I received a certain amount of hate mail but in those intervening
| months Vint Cert guessed 20-40%, Microsoft said 2/3rds, and IDC suggested
| 3/4ths. It is thus a conservative risk position to assume that any random
| counterparty stands a fair chance of being already compromised.
`----
http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=661
Over 50% of corporate desktops infected with malware: IronPort
,----[ Quote ]
| The report also reveals that more than 50% of corporate desktops
| worldwide are infected with some type of spyware with the rate of
| infection as high as 70% in the United States. Trojans or malicious
| system monitors represented over 7% of the infections. Rootkits and
| trick loaders, which reinstall spyware and other obfuscation techniques,
| make remediation very difficult thus prevention is the key to stopping
| these threats.
`----
http://www.crn-india.com/breakingnews/stories/66870.html
Botnet 'pandemic' threatens to strangle the net
,----[ Quote ]
| Cerf estimated that between 100 million and 150 million of the
| 600 million PCs on the internet are under the control of hackers,
| the BBC reports.
`----
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/26/botnet_threat/
|
|