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Study: Nearly a Quarter Million PCs Turned Into 'Zombies' Daily
(Click here to view the original thread with full colors/images)
Posted by: Ion Silverbolt
Looks like we're not the only country with worm trouble.
Experts tell TechNewsWorld that over the last six months, CipherTrust's "global threat correlation engine" had been identifying an average of 170,000 new infected zombie computers each day.
Record Month
The term "zombie" is used to describe a personal computer being used to perform a task or tasks without the owner's knowledge. These tasks may include sending spam, serving pornography, or performing denial of service attacks.
CipherTrust said that since the Sober outbreak in November, the number of new zombies sending spam and virus messages increased by nearly 50 percent, bringing the average total number to more than 250,000 new infected Internet Protocol (IP) addresses each day.
"That swell held up through the end of the year, bringing the average number of daily new zombies in December to 247,755," said CipherTrust.
More stats can be found here.
Posted by: alex ovenden
Interesting, this story.... a couple of months ago Norton's AV started telling me about heaps of intrusion attempts from many different ip addresses almost each online hour, but they almost all started with 155.143 which were the same numbers as my own ip address.
I emailed my ISP, Telstra Bigpond, with enough info to enable them to check it out. All I got back from them - and they are Australia's biggest ISP - were automated responses and, from real employees, waffle and advice telling me how to find out the source of the intruding ips. They gave a list of other ip address prefixes which they said were theirs and that they could not do anything about spam from other ip addresses, etc etc....
I looked up a few of the intruding ips - sure enough, they came from Telstra. I sent off another email pointing this out, thinking surely some human will read this and check it out. I also voiced the suspicion that maybe these peoples' computers were possibly being hijacked without their knowledge, which is exactly the sort of thing this article talks about. You might have expected that someone at the telco would be interested but no.... no action....big fat zero! With a customer service attitude like that, it is no wonder their share price here is steadily losing value!
A few weeks ago we installed a router and the inbuilt firewall seems to have stopped all the intrusion attempts.
Funny to think that hundreds of Telstra's client's computers could be zombies. Seems to match the attitude of the workers there!
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