US Reigns As Most Bot-Infected Country

Trailrunner7 writes "The US has by far the highest number of bot-infected computers of any country in the world, with nearly four times as many infected PCs as the country in second place, Brazil, according to a new report by Microsoft. The quarterly report on malicious software and Internet attacks shows that while some of the major botnets have been curtailed in recent months, the networks of infected PCs still represent a huge threat."

Re:Microsoft Did the Report?

[DarkKnightRadick]

I take that back. Not only do they report which OS, but claim their count by how many computers their malicious software tool has cleaned. lol

Re:I read the TFA

[Unoriginal Nick]

The US is most in absolute numbers. In rate per 1000, Turkey [microsoft.com] has the highest rate.

Re:I read the TFA

[T Murphy]

The actual Microsoft report has a map [microsoft.com] that is far more informative than the article itself. As expected, Brazil has a higher infection rate than the US, with the US only leading by gross number of infections. Of course, this data is just number of infections detected and cleaned- it isn't necessarily a complete survey. From the site where the map is given:

Figure 15 [the map] shows the infection rates in locations around the world using a metric called computers cleaned per thousand, or CCM, which represents the number of reported computers cleaned for every 1,000 executions of the MSRT.

The actual site is here [microsoft.com] if you want to get straight to the information (link is also given in the article).

Re:IT staff

[david.emery]

It's clear from my experience that you need a competent IT staff to run a network of Microsoft machines.

It's also clear from my experience that a reasonably intelligent group of Mac users do NOT need the same level of help. That's not to say they never need "professional experience," rather to point out that a single trained Mac IT support person takes care of a LOT more installations than a trained Windows IT support person. In the company I used to work for, I think that number was about 25-1; there were 2 Mac people supporting an installed Mac user base of several hundred in a department of, I don't know, 25-50 maybe for a Windows installed base of several thousand. Now some of those people did servers, routers, etc, and not just desktops.

Running a server, whether Windows, Mac OS X Server or Linux, requires a deeper level of training, experience and time investment.