Hi malware fighters,
Read about this here:
http://asert.arbornetworks.com/2009/01/where-botted-pcs-go-2008-q4/
pol
Thanks,
But sorry , what i have to do with this article? I’m a litle bit lost
Hi LeMoigne,
It is an article that demonstrates how to detect from where the botnets are being herded, and this info gathered by Honeypots and this sort of surveys will result in blacklists.
And yes there are people that block their computers to connect there, and yes the landscape and the sites are fluctuating and chancing all the time, making it more complicate.
It just a background article to show what experts are doing to detect the dangerous places of the internet.
And there is also a gigantic big percentage of renowned sites, that malcreants have infected, 70% of the 100 most visited websites have some form of malware on them: http://www.websense.com/site/Docs/whitepapers/en/WSL_ReportQ3Q4FNL.PDF?CMP=NR012109A
With 90 million PCs infected with Conficker worm at the moment with the most likely outcome a million wide cybercrime botnet, I like you to consider the information. En bref, cést ca!
polonus
Thanks for the info, Polonus. 
Hmmm …
Where do you come up with 90 million? This is about an order of magnitude higher than anything I have seen reported. Given the mechanism of infection … again … as far as I have seen this is largely a corporate problem rather than home user problem from most reputable sources. These forums cater to a far larger home user group than corporate.
We live in times where the climate of fear is one that seems to be more infectious than reality. Where the media need to heighten the sense of fear in our communities to make their profits and even our governments use it make us willing to erode our rights and increase their powers of surveillance of us all.
I am grateful for the work that (especially) polonus does in keeping us all up to date on threats here … but not all of us can or or should live our lives in fear of the consequences of not running a plethora of security solutions or always entirely believing every statistic placed before us.
I must (boringly) state again that I and the folks I support have used avast for more than the past 4 years. In that time all of the folks I support have abandoned the given wisdom here and just moved to the Windows firewall (rather than the ZA firewall). Every one of us is now also behind a commercial router.
Yes I do have all of them now using MBAM scans.
Nevertheless - during this period - not one of the folks in my support group has encountered a single instance of infection on their system reported by avast, MBAM or other security products along the way (like ZA or Windows Defender). That may well be that we are all boring old f*rts who do nothing adventurous on the net … but … I find it hard to believe that we may not just call in to question some of the statistics reported here.
Just as an ending thought looking at one of the links given to us by polonus … If 80+% of the email flowing is spam (and 80+% measured through what flow points) … how come that neither I or any of the folks I support (nor yet any of the folks I know) see anything like that? I guess we are … as reported above for viruses … especially blessed.
Well said, and I particularly agree with the highlighted sections.
“Paranoia strikes deep, into your life it will creep…”
(“For What It’s Worth”, by Buffalo Springfield)
Hi alanrf and OrangeCrate,
Well there are two sides of the spectrum, just like in normal life. The cup is half full or the cup is half empty. For the optimist it is half full, for others it is not. One can live fully aware of all the threats there are out on the Internet, and no one can say the Internet is not ridden with malware. If the situation was that rosy pink and all normal why could not you hang an unprotected computer onto the Internet and within a couple of minutes it has a least caught a mild malware cold.
If we would act to shoplifters as we tolerate malcreants and spammers all shops would be emptied.
One thing I can say something in the virtual world is not as it should be and if we should experience the same thing with a car as we experience with computers?
I am not exaggerating, and this has nothing to do with real life, but the way you are aware of the things that go on. If you just click, use a computer for fun, and are barely aware of what it is all about, your compouter will be that slow after some time and if you cannot cleanse it yourself, you dump and buy another one. That is the experience of millions and others profit.
In spite of the fact that some call me a fearmonger I try to go on with my education: why windows platforms are dangerous out of the box, why script can be abused, why it is dangerous to click, why full admin rights can work against you in case of a malware infection, why it is important to update and patch.
And yes folks, Conficker made an enormous amount of victims in areas where people have illegit XP machines running that cannot automattically update, and for that reason are not patched, legit versions where the administrator was away for the Season and they only enroll updates and patches every other month (normal would be weekly or whenever there is a threat), so the guess was 6% of all computers with Windows infected.
But again there are people that say the situation is different, that one does not need a software firewall,
that one av solution is a cure for all.
That the situation for other platforms is completely different I fully agree, there can be hacks but there is not a constant flak against spam, infected mails, I-frames, redirects, blacklisted certificates, nagware, bloatware, riskware, worms, bot droppers, file infectors, and what have you, but the general amount of Windows directed malware has doubled over the year, and no one can tell me the situation is changing for the better, there is only detection, prevention, but mainly defense and measurements after the fact,
polonus (malware fighter)
Damien my friend,
Half full or, half empty only works with 50% not 80% or 90% ;D ;D
Hello Bob3160,
I know for sure that you are the half full type. You are an optimist, while the pessimist will see it as half empty. And yes that is how you consider 50% = half the contents.
The official figure from a couple of days ago was a plausible figure of around 6% of all Windows computer infected with a variant of the Conficker worm (could be via mail, website, usb sticks (pen drives) etc.).
If that is a real figure then that still means a huge number of machines affected, and one thing from the outset, yours and mine were not among these, because we both have patched ours and kept our pen drives clean,
Stay safe and secure wherever you go,
polonus
It would be good if the search engines that make multi millions out of computer users cleaned up there acts and got a lot of these bad sites off the web.They just do not want to spend some of there massive fortunes protecting us the consumers.Without us they would go bust and have no advertising revenue but they treat us with contempt. ::).Thats my rant for 2009.
Codhead is making a point here, and there can be little debate about it. It is 100% true, and let us name the beast, yes it is Google, and I would not like to know how many infected sites they bring up to the innocent user that put in a query. Don’t do evil, but feel free to let it through…
polonus