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Netcraft Survey Updated
The latest survey is out and ready for reading from Netcraft. There's some interesting commentary in regards to Code Red, and its effects on web usage. One of the things that I found most interesting was the data showing that while the number of sites hosted by Apache continues to grow, the number of physical webservers running some variety of Windows is about half of the total. Worth checking out.
At least 150,000 active sites spread over 80,000 ip addresses worldwide running Microsoft-IIS have been taken down since the Code Red II worm was released. Superficially, it might be inferred that site managers had already pre-empted the advice published by Gartner to the effect that running Microsoft-IIS on the internet is more trouble than it's worth, and opens up a window of opportunity for attackers to cause disruption, data loss, and worse.
However, the implications for Microsoft are better than one might initially expect. Of the 80,000 ip addresses no longer running Microsoft-IIS, only around 2,000 are now running a competing web server. Notwithstanding the fact that when a web server is replaced, the replacement will not necessarily be on the same ip address, it does seem that in most cases sites have been taken down, or port filtered as part of a general tightening of security in the wake of Code Red, rather than the Windows disks being formatted and replaced with Linux/Apache.