US Reigns As Most Bot-Infected Country 121
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."
Microsoft Did the Report? (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm sure they failed to mention the OS with which most infected computers are running. :p
Re:Microsoft Did the Report? (Score:5, Informative)
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:Microsoft Did the Report? (Score:4, Interesting)
Which is only a small fraction of the real infections out there. I've cleaned thousands of infected computers since MS introduced that tool, and I've yet to see one which the tool dealt with adequately.
(Don't bother to say "Yeah, but if it dealt with it, you wouldn't see the computer!" If they really believed that tool was effective, then Microsoft wouldn't include the warning "you don't appear to have an antivirus solution installed" in their security center warning, now, would they?)
SB
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No kidding. And every last one of them, I'd imagine, is running some form of Windows. It's actually quite scary. The fact that MS can spin this good for themselves and people buy it? Even scarier.
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Indeed. But what the submission doesn't mention is that while the US may indeed have four times the number of bots of its nearest "rival", it also very likely has four times as many computers in total. In other words, a fairly pointless non-statistic.
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All statistics are pointless; because the numbers depend on who compiles them. Which is a small part of what I was trying to point out. ;-)
SB
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I'll probably catch hell for this here, but here's an example of programming stupidity that has irked me for a while, and I ran into when I tried to "friend" you (so that I'd see your posts, the whole reason for the "friend" modifier in the first place):
You have over 200 friends and foes at the moment.
Oh noes!!!!!!!!!!!
I know it's an arbitrary number... but I haven't been able to friend/foe anyone for about five
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Subscribers get 400, which I found out a while ago when I tried to friend three people who friended me and couldn't friend them and mentioned it in my journal. One of them bought me a subscription! So now I have almost 300 friends, the same number of fans, no foes and almost 30 people who freak out when they see one of my posts.
If you have a lot of foes, make the least bad ones neutral to free up space for friending.
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If you have any foes at all, maybe you should get out more. Over the last decade or so, I've come across posters with whom I disagree completely enough to nudge me to rank them as a foe, only to find a few months later that they are talking complete sense on another topic.
There's no reason why this forum has to be adversarial, and it would probably be better without this friend/foe claptrap.
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I agree about the foes (I have none), but friending someone does have advantages, such as being notified when someone with interesting journals posts a new one. I friend fans out of simple courtesy.
At one time I figured that the few foeing me were probably trolls, until I looked up a few of them and found that they were all good, contributing members. It's a mystery to me except one guy; there was a subthread where I mentioned that I stayed away from married woman but considered any unmarried woman fair gam
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I think it's more intended as an emergency tool to clean up widespread overnight threats, like Blaster, or for dangerous infections like keyloggers.
Come on, now. Microsoft surely has the resources to write the best antivirus/anti-rootkit/anti-malware solutions for their own code.
At the very least they could work with the community to close the holes they already have, and to develop better solutions to detection and mitigation.
They rarely do (I know some will say that they d
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Come on, now. Microsoft surely has the resources to write the best antivirus/anti-rootkit/anti-malware solutions for their own code.
Nope. MS don't even understand the internals of their own NT kernel. There is no hope whatsoever of MS making "their" code secure - it just can't be done. Their only hope is to ditch all their products and start again - probably with a BSD or Linux core - and forget compatibility with their existing codebase.
Game over, Microsoft.
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but because the AV industry is terrible at writing software,
Oh, an astroturfer. What fun ;=)
The solutions I use are what have proven to me to work in the field.
Neither Defender nor the Microsoft Security Essentials do. I go with what works; what fixes the problems for my customers. That is how I make a living. My customers don't care to pay high dollars for to fix their problems; they aren't "business" accounts.
Microsoft is in the best position to develop an anti-virus produc
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MSE is free, available on every OS back to XP and as from my personal experience and research actually works. They're certainly far better than any other free AV solution available and I've seen it pick up stuff which broke Norton, all without requiring an extra core just to run your AV program.
Not sure what the heck you mean about business accounts or high dollars since the app is free.
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I strongly disagree with you about it being better than external AV solutions; I haven't seen that it can fix much at all. I see numerous computers with it installed that are just plain hosed.
As to the latter I am referring to the high cost of Microsoft tech support for the average home user. Last I checked it was 2 free incidents then $35 PER INCIDENT.
SB
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What does how much it costs to call Microsoft have to do with their AV? I also never said it was perfect, it won't stop an idiot who runs stuff they shouldn't, but all the other free options are worse, the pay ones are no better, and it doesn't kill your CPU running it.
You don't have to be some sort of elite product to be the best AV solution, you just need to find problems some of the time and use less resources than the malware.
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Then don't post AC.
SB
ALL RIGHT !! USA NUMBER 1 USA! USA! USA! USA! (Score:5, Funny)
Eat that China. You suck!
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slmgr -rearm
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I haven't heard a decent Irish insult in ages!.
I'll speak more slowly then.
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what about us Micks? I haven't heard a decent Irish insult in ages!
Ok, here you go...
How many Irishmen does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Three. One to hold the bulb and two to drink until the room spins.
What's a seven course meal for an Irishman? A six pack and a potato.
If you go into a bar and hear a British accent, how do you tell if he's English, Scotch, or Irish? You wait until a fly lands in his beer. An Englishman will make a face and politely order another beer. A Scotsman will make a face, pull
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I read the TFA (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I read the TFA (Score:5, Informative)
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It would be almost impossible for us to ever be behind a nation like Switzerland which is substantially smaller than us, regardless of policies in place. Given that we've probably got more computers infecte
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There's the point about licensed copies of Windows involved made elsewhere in the thread, but besides the absolute count vs. rate point, the impression given is that a large number of bot activity emanate from US computers compared to other countries.
There is other bot activity such as generating email or probing networks to infect other computers that I don't see, but I can tell you it isn't forum board spamming coming in large numbers from US computers. It comes
Re:I read the TFA (Score:5, Informative)
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).
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Seems more likely that those places are simply free of licensed copies of Microsoft Windows.
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It needs to be noted that Brazil has a much higher rate of use of Linux than the USA. It is certainly high enough to skew these statistics and might be high enough that, if it were taken into account, would cause Brazil to fall out of worst place.
Of course there is the notoriously difficult problem of assessing how many persons are using Linux, so there is probably no way to estimate the penetration of malware in all computers in use.
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I notice viruses don't cross over into Canada. The border guard is doing a great job not allowing export of a military grade infections. That, or the mounties and socialized medicine are doing great jobs at protecting computers.
And that is amazing since MS is so prevalent in Canada.
http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2008/09/18/f-multiple-sclerosis.html [www.cbc.ca]
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Yeah but bonus points for using a car analogy.
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I Blame WindowBUYTIXNOW4SALE (Score:2, Funny)
I blame Window#BUY TIX NOW 4 SALE only $19,99 in America dollar! Extra fine speci4l sauce extra.
You give gold, please.
Scraping the bottom here (Score:1)
Quick Question (Score:5, Insightful)
How many computers total are in the US compared to other countries of the world?
Simple counts don't cut it in the real world of statistics.
I bet 100% of Canadian computers could be infected and we still might not beat out the US. Considering the Population of California alone is greater than our national population (or at least it was last time I checked).
Re:Quick Question (Score:4, Insightful)
this (Score:4, Interesting)
Exactly. Here [microsoft.com] are Microsoft's statistics after computer prevalence is taken into account. Quote from that page:
Given the very low infection rate of most of Africa, though, something tells me Microsoft's "CCM" metric may not perfectly reflect real infection rates.
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For years before he stopped being CEO, Bill Gates was obsessed with getting the Chinese to pay for Windows.
Re:Quick Question (Score:5, Insightful)
Huh? It entirely depends on what the statistics are being used for. Simple counts are useful when the amount of activity is proportional to the population size.
For example, with a botnet, it's the absolute number of bots that matters, because the bots in a botnet are interchangeable (it doesn't matter where they're located, or what processor they're running, etc).
So if you're going to propose botnet solutions on a per country basis, then you want to know which country has the greatest number of active bots, not the country which has the greatest percentage of infectected computers.
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So if you're going to propose botnet solutions on a per country basis, then you want to know which country has the greatest number of active bots, not the country which has the greatest percentage of infectected computers.
Um, no. That only works if your "solution" is to sever the affected country from access to the internet. Otherwise you still care more about percentages, because as the percentage level decreases your efforts to combat the problem quickly run afoul of the diminishing returns.
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How many computers total are in the US compared to other countries of the world?
If your site is under attack from a botnet, do you care much if a zombie is Canadian or in US?
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How many computers total are in the US compared to other countries of the world?
If your site is under attack from a botnet, do you care much if a zombie is Canadian or in US?
Well, I much prefer the overly polite Canadian zombies, myself....
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I bet 100% of Canadian computers could be infected and we still might not beat out the US
Why didn't that sentence confuse you?
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Having a problem with complex thoughts expressed in two sentences, are we?
Cyber Defense (Score:1, Funny)
Our Federal Department of Cyber Defense is as effective as tepid jello against spammers and spambots.
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"Now *there's* a fetish!"
And he's not alone...
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True measure (Score:5, Insightful)
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Absolutely true -- any estimate of total botnet populations that isn't in excess of 100 million can safely be disregarded as the product of either (a) poor methodology or (b) creative public relations.
Moreover, since these statistics are allegedly based on the number supposedly cleaned up, they've severely biased toward "systems which happen to have the appropriate cleanup tool installed AND which happen to have malware that the cleanup tool knows about". Given that the bad guys have copies of the cleanup
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...the article has very little of that information, and the summary has none of it.
The first rule of Slashdot.
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Numbers... (Score:3, Insightful)
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percentage per 1000
Idiot
IT staff (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:IT staff (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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It takes 2 people to take care of about 200 Macs, and ~30-35 people to take care of 2000 Windows machines, of which some are servers, and you admit some of those take care or network/firewall/routers etc. To me that looks like your desktop support people are almost exactly equally distributed between Mac and Windows, about 1/100 with the rest of the Windows guys running the servers and the network.
Honestly I'd say those numbers are pretty good overall from a machine per t
US Reigns As Most Bot-Infected Country on Web (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:US Reigns As Most Bot-Infected Country on Web (Score:5, Funny)
Look, as an American, it feels good to be the bestest at something for a change. We're desperate, we'll take anything.
In other news (Score:1)
Why can't we fix this? (Score:2)
Forgive my ignorance on the subject matter, but why can't we fix this?
Is it because the infected machines have no anti-virus or anti-malware? Would a free AV program installed on the maxhine fix the problem on an individual machine?
Is it because it is too hard for most AV programs to detect a Bot?
Is it because there are too many older computers that don't have a supported AV solution?
Could a free AV check on the most popular homepages (google.com, yahoo.com, live.com, etc) inform users that they are potenti
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The problem isn't cleaning up the malware, the problem is preventing it from getting back there shortly afterwards. No anti-malware tool will help if the OS permits applications to run outside the sandbox - even if it asks for user permission to do so, casual users will happily click on "yes" the requisite amount of times to see the promised boobs (or whatever). The only true fix is iOS-style walled garden where the OS does not let the user make security decisions at all (and hence make mistakes about them)
National Reformat Day (Score:2)
Re:National Reformat Day (Score:4, Insightful)
Too bad, as a species, we don't seem capable of this kind of synchronization.
Actually as a species we are quite capable of synchronisation, the problem is people only synchronise of trivial bullshit EG: sporting events.
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All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy....
Seriously /.'ers, there are people out there that don't consider computer maintenance as a fun thing to do. I know, it's blasphemy, but variety is the spice of life.
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I wasn't there, but I have observed the phenomenon myself and I don't think that there's any way of looking at it which isn't terrifying.
Any figures on Mac or Linux botnets? (Score:2)
Wrong headline, wrong RTFA (Score:3, Funny)
Sorry to disappoint the USA #1 fans, but it should have read: The U.S. 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, until Microsoft's malicious software removal tool cleaned up said computers so those stats are no longer valid.
F*cking Bots, How Do They Work? (Score:2)
I am so sick of my mother's computer getting owned. Lay off the warez and porn sites ma.
What the hell can I do so she'll stop calling me for tech support when her computer starts acting like Robin Williams on crack every other week?
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What the hell can I do so she'll stop calling me for tech support when her computer starts acting like Robin Williams on crack every other week?
Next time you show up to fix it, act like Robin Williams on crack.
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Here are a few options:
1) Don't give her an admin account. If she's using XP or higher, give her a "guest" account. She won't be able to install anything, but that's a good thing the next time she clicks on a trojan or visits a web site that tries to silently install something. She'll still get viruses, but if they can't break out of her user folder, they can be cleaned off by simply logging on as the administrator and renaming her user folder (so you can move her documents and favorites to the new user fol
wth /. wth. (Score:2)
COMMON GUYS! This is a website that is *supposed* to consist primarily of intelligent people and nobody asked the important question, or pointed out the moronic flaw!
Of course the US will have the highest absolute number of infected computers, we have the highest number of computers period! This is only relevant if we have the highest PERCENTAGE of infected computers. if 10% of our computers are infected and 100% of canada's computers are infected, we still probably have a lot more infected computers than
Makes sense (Score:2)
There are a lot of privately owned Windows boxes in the USA that have fast internet connections and excessive amounts of CPU and RAM. This combination is surely juicier than the kind of specs and connections and (importantly) volume you can get in most other places. I would be shocked if first-world countries with large tech sectors were not the biggest source of compromised computers.
keep using Windows... (Score:1)
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They also give it as a percentage of the number of executions, but that would go down if a country had more executions of the tool.
Also, the tool runs itself once a month. Is there any way to run it manually?