Slashdot Mirror
UK Officially The Most Hacked Country
_Hellfire_ writes "Symantec's Internet Security Threat Report for the second half of 2004 says that the UK is leading the rest of the world with bot networks. The report states that "...25.2% [of bots] are located in the UK. That now puts the country ahead of the US (24.6%), China (7.8%), Canada (4.9%) and Spain (3.8%)". Symantec blames a sudden uptake of residential broadband connections without the awareness of the required security measures."
I wonder how accurate these statistics are.
Number one, Number one, Number one, Number one, Number one, Number one, Number one, !! we had to win at something sooner or later
Will wash cars for karma
You have to wonder about this. They show the US at 24.6% of PCs compromise- and the UK at 25.2%. This is well within the margin of error for even the most rigorous of surverying.
w00t! Finally we lead the world at something!
Invoicing, Time Tracking, Reporting
Basically they should be made compulsary for all broadband connections. It is the plethora of cheap USB ADSL modems that are being offered free with connections that it causing the problem.
Yet another example of the rest of the world overthrowing american hegemony. We all need to do our part to get USA back on top. Install worms and Trojans.
Should we change it to "Tommy six-pack" instead of "Joe six-pack" now?
::jafomatic
Or it is because most hackers or script kiddies are located in the US and elsewhere outside the UK and they prefer hacking abroad, because that might limit the possibility of legal troubles.
www.weberseite.at
We're #2! We're #2! We're #2! :D
I can definitely vouch for this, I personally witnessed some 20 odd pieces of malware duking it out on my brothers 2Mbit broadband to see who could relay the most spam.
Since then, I've converted the majority of my friends and family to Debian and they haven't looked back.
that is a HUGE number of bots. I wonder if there is a greater penetration of computers in the UK into homes, which might explain this.
Get a free iPod Nano 4GB!
IMNSHO having a box on the net is nearly as sharp situation as driving a car - how about some computer-internet-licence if one wants to have one?
Since you can spam (willing or not even knowing about it) or be a zombie for some hax0r-attacks, you should carry responsibility. At least partly.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi
being one in which a Mr. George W. Bush hacked the Prime Minister's office and started using it to send spam worldwide
Our retarded government is shoving broadband down everyone's throats. That means that tons and bloody tons of people are all getting broadband, without firewall software or proper instructions on how to use it.
...considering that the US is a 3rd world country when it comes to internet connectivity, it's not _that_ surprising.
With just a little bit more effort, I'll bet that the US'll be able to edge them out. Just remember, kids: ActiveX == Good; Firewalls == Bad. And always give out your password to people who ask for it.
Tluin natha Linux xxizzuss uriu olt bwael mon'tun.
Size is immaterial.
Population is what's important. 60 million in the UK versus a bit less than 300 million in the US.
That's a difference of a factor of 5, as opposed to a factor of 50 or more (probably a lot more) for landmass.
Still a big difference, though.
I personally think that the approach towards broadband was mostly done wrong. The large majority of users should never be fully visible online - those broadband routers should be doing NAT for all but a small minority of users.
While we cant code or design around user stupidity (in the sense that if you give a user a button that says "DONT CLICK HERE, IT WILL INSTALL A SPYBOT" and they'll still click it), we certainly can design around stupid operating systems that have holes you could drive a transport truck through. NAT does this quite well - I reccomend a NAT router (WRT54G, specifically) for everyone I know - including myself. It saves massive amounts of problems.
Part of the issue also lies with the fact that most "concious" users load up their PC with firewalls and zonealarm and so forth to the point where its slow because of all the crap on the system.
.
The UK the most hacked country in the world? I myself am a UK citizen, and can personally vouch for the fact that this is not true. I, for example, have never been hack-
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Please write a bot that does SETI@home or folding@home or something useful.
All these bots are just doing email spamming anyways, and since it seems like thats the way its always going to be..... why not have clueless users' spare processing power go to something useful?
Thanks.
...for us to really show up here. I'd be interested to see what percenetage of British households still modems vs. broadband. I'm sure it's far smaller than the ratio of American homes.
IMNSHO having a box on the net is nearly as sharp situation as driving a car...
...except that if anyone could drive a car without a license, then there would be far more dangerous drivers on the road (no tests to pass!) and more fatalities. WHen was the last time you heard of a child being killed because someone left ports open on his PC?
...say that you should buy more security products! Wow, it's almost like the MS studies that say linux is more expensive and the environmental studies by the meat industry that say millions of gallons of pig shit isn't harmful to the environment so you might as well just spray it into the air.
This is the second one in as many days, too. Come on, could we get a real story, not one spun from the gossamer threads of greed and conflict of interest?
adam b.
"Symantec blames a sudden uptake of residential broadband connections without the awareness of the required security measures."
Really? I'd blame it on too many people using insecure shitty software to access the internet, or worse, not knowing what the hell they're doing.
Although no doubt the drive towards "Broadband Britian" hasn't helped this. What the hell does getting everyone connected to the Internet help to achieve anyway? Oh, I forgot, phrases such as "Digital Divide" and "Broadband Britian" make a good soundbite whilst distracting people from the real problems.
And thankfully more people are going to wireless, which obviously necessitates a harware router, which should (for the most part) solve the problem. Hopefully.
Reports show sales of Symantec's popular Anti-virus packages in the UK lagging behind sales in the US, and sales of the Macintosh version lagging behind everywhere.
Blake
US (24.6%) ... Canada (4.9%)
This is really problematic, given that Canada only has about one tenth of the US population. Does this mean that if we had as many people as the USA, 49% would be hacked?
Or is it just because we have more broadband per capita than in the US?
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
ISPs should help their clients with securing their networks by selling routers or firewalls to their customers. That's like selling a gun to someone that doesn't know how to operate the safety trigger...
The best way to predict the future is to invent it. -Alan Kay
The situation really is bad..
In the last year 512Kbs ADSL Broadband has tumbled in price to little more expensive than unmetered dial-up, and a lot of clueless types bought in
Typical British ISPs provide a USB modem for ADSL or an Ethernet/USB Cable modem, and a driver/configurator disk. No consumer ISP provides a NAT router by default (its a costly option, and usually a crappy rebranded far-eastern product that crashes all the time).
Very few of them even provide a software firewall. AOL is a notable exception (about time they did something right) providing a firewall in their standard AOL Broadband software.
I spend a lot of my free time installing Zonealarm/Sygate Personal for clueless people wondering why their brand new XP box and brand new ADSL connection keep crashing....
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Perhaps it's simply because the US ISP's are better funded and more able to apply expensive security solutions...?
Nexsan Technologies SATA RAID
"Most hacked" is not the English translation of "largest percentage hacked". "Most hacked" would refer to the largest quantity hacked. The proper English translation of that statistic is "most hacky" - even if I did just make up "hacky".
--
make install -not war
That explains why I get asked "why's my PC running so slow?" so much!
and well you should not!
for my ally is the microsloth and it is a powerful ally
(for allowing remote exploits, botnets and other general nastiness)!
'By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes'
I blame the abundance of Spam from the UK squarely on Monty Python.
Now they want to bring "Spam A Lot" to the US? I don't think so, Nigel.
Time to dump some tea into the harbour.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
A lot of ADSL connections in the UK now come with bandwidth limits, and charges per GB over the standard monthly utilisation. This is a relatively new concept in retail broadband in the UK (In Oz it is almost the standard).
Anyway, it's sort of weird that the ISPs now actually have a vested interest in their users contracting malware; they make more money out of it in over-charges...
Invoicing, Time Tracking, Reporting
Speaking as a UK consumer, it doesnt surprise me. Most of the people i deal with dont bother with a virus checker until they start having problems, and most viruses these days seem to be designed for creating botnets so try to not to hog resources, crash the computer or use too much bandwidth. If only other windows programs were so well designed :-)
When I first got broadband (About 2 years ago?) , the ISP i use, (Pipex) offered a free virus checker and gave instructions on how to run it. They dont any more. Nor do anyone else.
I personally think that no-one who manages their own computer and *doesnt* know when their virus checker was last updated shouldnt be allowed near the internet.
Why Canada ranks so low is a mystery to me. Canadians have a reasonable uptake of broadband and they are no smarter than Americans. I wonder if this has as much to do with the regulatory environment and the ISPs as anything else. The two biggies are Sympatico (Bell) and Rogers (cable tv). Does the equipment they supply act like a fire wall or something? Are they actively doing something to prevent infection?
Considering Symantec's hack job at statistics (see this earlier article), I hold these numbers in doubt. Are the numbers fluffed-up by Symantec's marketing/execs to increase market share? (It's a serious question -- I'm not trying to get modded as a troll.)
Someone at Symantic retiring and they are trying to pump up the stock?
Recent Symantic news:
OSX Doom and gloom, Symantic will save you.
Fire Fox doom and gloom Symantic will save you.
Now this
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Five times as many, not six. Otherwise the point stands. (I assume, of course, the statistics are accurate)
An entertaining, revealing read to say the least. I believe the prevalence of internet cafes are to blame. Affords greater anonymity as opposed to doing this from a business or home residence.
As you can discern from my nickname, I like bikes. I often peruse the listings on eBay to see what's out there (I only have two bikes...so far!). There's no shortage of 1-day and 3-day listings that appear to originate from London. They're pure scam listings for very high-end bikes like Pinarello Dogmas, Colnago C-40s and C-50s, and Trek Madones.
"Play is the only way the highest intelligence of humankind can unfold." -- Joseph Chilton Pearce
(With apologies to bash.org.)
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Yeah, sorry about that. I'm trying to find other things to do with my time you know, to distract myself..Ooh! Windows box!
This gives the curse of bugger! a whole new set of meanings, none of them pleasant to the user or their computer...
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
Most of the big ISPs in the UK supply these horrible usb modems for their ADSL service, leaving the only protection being the Windows firewall. I've had to sort out several PCs from friends and family that were brand new, but shipped with XP SP1 and pwned within minutes of plugging these modems in. Contrast this to when I lived in Holland - adsl routers with NAT always supplied or recommended.
If a man empties his purse into his head no man can take it from him. An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.
I wonder if Steve Jobs addressed this on his last trip to the UK? Similar details and statisitcs were mentioned at MacWorld but I do not remember the details. Apple really should start the PR machine at this level and show the ease of use and security of OSX so everyone could see the benefits of a well designed system. I love my Mini and the integration with the software. Not being a remote zombie is the only thing I've found that does not just work with Apple!
Also, if you hit someone with a cricket bat it tends to break where the handle attaches to the body. A baseball bat is much better for beating people to death.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
No thank you.
I prefer living in my multi-million house living off of spam advertisements. Besides, who would want to SETI?
Your welcome.
Maybe the votes were counted on special machines!
Or maybe they just counted all the UK votes and then stopped counting everything else leaving a rather large pile of US 'uncounted' votes...
oh, that was last years non story!
I recently read that over 40% of UK Internet connections were now broadband, and most of these became active within the last year.
I think the broadband providers should offer a router with a suitable built-in hardware firewall as a standard part of the package (or failing that insist on you having an 'approved' router/modem with then necessary smarts, in the service contract).
Unfortunately most of the domestic packages are still 'wires only'.
Slashdot just links news articles on their. Sure, there is the occasional interview, but all they do is link other places on the front page and add in a little blurb to make it seem like work. Now, they have no doubt hundreds of corporate sponsers fueling the decadent Ann Arbor lifestyle of the editors. It's fucking genius, all I have to do now is find a subculture to target and make sure they grow into my own little penguin jiihad.
I'm gonna be rich!
Well looks like i just found the idea time to set my startup company running.
From my experience the main problem is with Home users who don't give a toss, and with SME's who can't afford a full time IT guy so only call people in when they notice somethign is wrong.
That leave a lot of room for error.
Not surverying, Log File analasys
lots of employment to fix this stuff! why do you think i keep writing viruses and adware?
In the US we can shoot the hackers, but in the UK they have to club them to death which takes an inordinate effort.
But clubbing them to death is so much more satisfying (and stress relieving).
Well, NAT might be a good thing in that it's a simple "security" step that _currently_ helps protect users against _some_ threats.
Alas, it does really break the way the 'net works - hosting your own services can be a screaming nightmare over NAT. With static IP addresses, always-on 'net connections, and things like MacOS/X's Apache-based "personal web sharing", that's no longer just the preserve of the hard-core geek.
I'm with the parent poster to your post in most regards. I'm also still hopeful that we'll see IPv6 start to take the worst of the weight off soon (now that 6to4 permits it to be adopted in cells anywhere on the 'net).
The uptake of broadband and WiFi has been immense over the past 6 or so months. Where before I had no problems with WLAN coverage as mine was the only one on the street, now there's one eminating from every home. Just in the few surrounding roads there are dozens of wireless networks in place, and hardly any have even changed the SSID, let alone disabled broadcasting of it. Only a handful use any form of actual security, such as WEP.
Even the people that should know better, such as my neighbour that claims to be an IT professional (if you're reading this, no. 14, TURN ON WEP AND CHANGE THE DAMN SSID!) have left their connections wide open.
This isn't just a security issue though. It becomes a real annoyance when my PDA wants to connect to any of the unsecure networks within range, and won't even detect my own. Consumer WAPs should have SSID broadcasting off by default - it's only necessary for public access points - and consumers need to be made aware that these devices should not just be plugged in and used without putting in place decent security measures. The initial setup wizards should leave them with a far more secure network, because the reduction in performance from using WEP is nothing compared to having me use your ADSL for bittorrent downloads.
This comment was formatted for readability, but I forgot the line break tags
Just show that your average brit is snobbish fool.
If one wished to insult the intelligence of those of another country, surely one would strive to construct a grammatically correct sentence?
Lord Daftwager, I'd wager that I could transform this Anonymous Coward into a proper English speaking lady in time for the garden party. What do you say, old chap?
I don't really agree re weak typing, though. It's not really weak typing that's at issue, it's that memory management is still done "by hand". Most of the nasty overflows stem from the fact that C lets you copy a 200 char long buffer into (and over the end of) a char[20]. There are other related issues, but I don't think weak typing is one of them. Weak typing is dumb, yes, but I think manual memory management is the real culprit.
Also, while ISPs can't track down all the compromised machines, some simple steps can massively reduce the damage:
My ISP does all of this, and more. It's really only the responsible thing to do, and I don't expect it costs them a large amount of time. The biggest cost is probably slightly smarter and more powerful routers.
I think you'll find that the United Kingdom is far more civilised than you describe. We just politely ask them to die.
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
For aggressively marketing broadband services to the completely clueless masses. These companies don't give a crap that these new accounts end up hurting people's computers and the Internet as a whole, so long as the $$$$$$$$ keeps rolling in.
As the nation mourns the president of America's most beloved college, we must now understand why Lawrence Summers had to die. Was he killed in a civil manner? No, of course not. I would have preferred that Mr. Summers was poisoned as opposed to being crucified in one of the cafeteria's while rabid feminist zealots lobbed rotting food at him. No man deserves to that die, but he had to die so he might as well get it over with. Summers represented a new era of conservativism in which ideas could be discussed freely without fear of being put in a Soviet show trial. Summers was, if I might be so audacious to say so, the next Voltaire. The liberals couldn't handle him and to be frank I doubt America was ready for Lawrence Summers. Was he right? Yes, yes he was. Were the zealots in the ostentatious women's studies department wrong? Yes, of course they were wrong. Women's studies is overflowing with pretentious, sexist batshit loonies. But if Lawrence Summers was allowed to spread his message of freedom of speech and new ideas, America may very well have been engulfed in the bloodiest war of all time. So, Lawrence, maybe in a couple of hundred years once the the current liberalism is out of vogue.
God bless you, Lawrence Summers, may your ideas live to fight another day.
China Population = 1,246,871,951 with 7.8% of BN
US Population = 272,639,608 with 24.6% of BN
UK Population = 59,113,439 with 25.2% of BN
Spain Population = 39,167,744 with 3.8% of BN
Canada Population = 31,006,347 with 4.9% of BN
World Population = 5,995,544,836 with 100% of BN
Per Capita Botnets = PCB
So if we take china as the baseline population...
Canada is about 40.2 times as small so 40.2 times 4.9% = 197% So if Canada was as large as China we would be pumping out like 197% of all the botnets in the world...
This statistically clearly shows that China is not pulling its weight as far as botnet creation is concerned. They should hike up their socks (or whatever) and start producing some botnets. Maybe they could start trying to use pirated versions of MS, I hear that works well...
Feel free to check my calculations or produce your own, I am 94.3% sure that it is valid (3 times out of 20)!
Out.
DarthVain
"Symantec blames a sudden uptake of residential broadband connections without the awareness of the required security measures"
No only in the UK but everywere - who is at fault at the lack of awereness here?
Could it be the ISP and computer vendours promising all the good things but failing to provide proper information about computer/online security?
While it could be argued that average user should inform themselves about what they are getting into, ISP and computer vendours are not informing customers about potential risks right from the begining, like when a new computer is bought, or when they sign-up for an internet connection.
Having a web page buried deep within the web site doesn't really help much, because by the time the average user gets there their computer is already infected.
The problem with Guinness in this country is that by the time it gets here it usually has a very bitter taste that I don't detect nearly as much in fresh kegs.
That said I think some of its biggest fans in the US drink it mainly for its alternative and "Look at how dark my beer is!" image.
I tried so hard... I really tried.
I set up a honey pot and got it up to 55 different spywares on it. It should be noted that Rogers up here has the usual suspect ports blocked halfway up stream which means an unpatched XP box won't get hit right away with things like MSBlaster, etc.
This might at least partially explain why we got such a low score.
I want to see 5 lights. I really do want to see 5 lights.
Most food in the UK does suck...
Translation: Symantec thinks they should be selling more software in the UK and US. I'll believe it when I see an analysis done by someone with less of an interest in selling substandard security software.
can we say desperate yet ?
good news for the short traders though
ok folks can you answer me this one in all seriousness how do you know
when your pc has been owned.
Is there a site which will scan for probems originating from your Pc.
something simple that anyone could run and be able to say yes there is
a problem heres how to fix it?
I don't think anyone wants their pc to be used as a spam bot dos bot
so for all the guys who know how to stop this problem, educate and inform
please.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
It's because all the smart people left for America and Australia a long time ago.
Wanna see a shallow gene pool? Visit East Anglia.
Makes your average Alabamanian look like Einstein.
Marketing speak translates into " Buy our products "..
Its all a scam. We shouldn't need to have "security measures".. Catch the bastards that are causing the problem and put them in jail. Problem solved.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
As a Canadian, I'm be surprised and happy to see how long our stats are for being "botted." We have a *lot* of covereage with broadband service, even in small towns, so a large number of people are now online /w high-speed.
Given that though, I also know some of the main ISPs have no problem yoinking PC's (at least I've known them to do it for open/spam proxies)... so perhaps that helps a bit.
the only way is down
I have never gotten any spam that came from *.co.uk. Hell I never got any spam that mentioned: sixes and sevens, cherio, and all that other stereotypical bs or anything UK specific. Hey if they can't spell John in US spam (Jjoohunnn) which is the American stereotype of being near-retarded, there has to be some spam that mentions sixes and sevens!
But to be sure I don't have anything to worry about I am going to remove the blackhole from korea and give it to UK.
<3 the UK, <3 my blackholes
[!] No, I can't see my comments. They are not worthy of +3 moderation.
Don't get me wrong, they won't be *secure* - but an insecure WAP isn't half as bad as a completely insecure box with a real IP address. At least from a spam standpoint. To 0wnz0r my wireless router (assuming I hadn't set the password, which I have), you'd have to get close and browse the old 192.168.0.1. A spammer at home can try hacking that IP...in fact, if there are any spammers listening, I recommend you try it.
Put it this way - a spammer now could run an effectively infinite network of spambots. But how many could he run if he actually had to get close enough, in physical proximity, to use an open wireless node? If he's industrious and lives in a dense city, maybe a few tens or maybe a hundred in a day? And that's such a pain in the ass you couldn't do that every day.
Realistically, if everybody went to wireless, a spammer would be limited to a few bots nearby. It would also help track him down (again, the physical proximity thing). And it makes it almost guaranteed that he'll be physically be in the jurisdiction in which he commits the crime.
Based on episodes of Faulty Towers I have watched I'd say the preferred killing method in the UK is to grit your teeth and passively-agressively kill the other person using pure resentment. Though based on episodes of The Young Ones I'd also say it would involve taking the person and ramming them head first through a wall.
"awareness of the required security measures."
Not if it's a well-written, patched system with lots of security controls.
They must means required windows-hole-filling measures.
Yeah, Linux/BSD can get virii too, but if you're smart enough you won't get them to begin with. I don't run any anti-virus on my desktop for the past 6 years and no problems so far. But it'd be nice if windows had a heuristic checker/syscall catcher before executing a program:
"The program you've launched wants to erase all your files, shall I let it continue?" says Clippy. C'mon, windows isn't meant for the advanced user, let's make it default for the regular home user and be a PITA to more technically inclined people.
It explains how they obtained their data. It is through their DeepSight TMS and MSS services.
>>Look how Tony Blair sucks Bush's ballz on Iraq
True, but then Tony B. Liar is not exactly your 'Average Brit'.
Your 'Average Brit' would much rather kick Bush in the balls than suck them (and so would most of the rest of the world).
This is not surprising since the UK government is little more than an extension of the Bush Net. With the Prime Minister being the biggest Bot or should I say "Prime Bot".
This is the land of Turing. He wouldn't have allowed this!
Stephan
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
...that the number of bots is lower. Not exactly good for business. If you are going to rant, you might as well try to look half-intelligent by reading the report.
No wonder they're suing Microsoft.
Since no one seems fit to actually read the report before commenting and looking like an idiot, here it is.
My parents phoned a couple of weeks ago - always a sign that their PC is acting up.
"Hi! How are you?"
"Er. Fine."
"The computer doesn't work."
"What do you mean 'Doesn't work?'"
"It doesn't connect to the Internet."
"Oh, OK. What happens?"
"Well, you see, we just upgraded to broadband, and it kept popping up messages, so, well, we uninstalled that anti-virus software that you put on it. And now it doesn't go online at all."
Silence...
I'll be visiting them over the Easter weekend with a CD.
UK officially The Most Hacked Country - WRONG
:-D
UK officially The Most Cracked Country - CORRECT
Hackers are the good boys
- Slayer_X
http://www.slayerx.org/
Lima
I have used PC's for years, been both a programmer and a hardware designer (so not totally technically illiterate) but always had an I.T. geek (love em really)looking after my security for me - a technological road I have not needed to travel down before but learning now.. Finally signed up with Broadband (on my home PC) here in the UK last week and am loving it (Plus net - pretty good as it goes... but USB modem :( ). Have XP SP2 installed (firewall activated before going on net), running Avast home Antivirus, and having used computers for the past 20 years know the difference between which pop ups to click (ie none) and what a 'legit' site looks like so careful AS I CAN BE with my surfing. How safe am I? What else can I consider to protect myself?
Answers on the back of a postcard please to...
Does he beat your mum when he gets home?
"The Milliard Gargantubrain? A mere abacus - mention it not."
Drumming up business in the places where they know the most gullible people are - the UK.
As part of their public broadcasting responsibility the BBC could broadcast daily programs that highlight the problems that exist and explain in laymans terms what can be done about them. This could make pretty good TV if there were interviews with people/companies who had been adversely affected by hackers/viruses/worms etc - definitely a lot more interesting than the reality TV rubbish that we get at the moment. And perhaps people could be encouraged to get help from a "knowledgable friend " to give their computer a once-over.
There's at least one cableco that now offers wireless broadband with the AP built into the CATV set-top box. As I don't use this product (I *do* have a hardware wireless router) I have no idea what, if any, security is built into it and whether it's enabled by default. To be fair, the cableco in question[1] seems to be relatively clueful, so quite possibly it is set up to be secure out of the box.
[1] not the TLA-named one
After moving from the UK to the USA I am not supprised about this statistic. The simple reason I can see is the cost of (antivirus) software and (router) hardware in the UK is probably the most expensive in the world - a detereant to end users actually buying and using them.
Tony Blair was hacked by Bush's "intelligence on WMD". Who's your sys admin? Bush is just a script kiddie deploying zombie Rumsfeld bots that you should have been able to protect against. And you better beef up your firewallz cuz I hear there is a new W32.IranWar virus spreading along with an attempted Trojan.WolfowitzWorldBank penetration of your financial ports (courtesy s.k.Bush!). Get with it man, this is basic stuff!
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
I am sure the Brits are really happy with their MS products now...... :)
Oh brilliant!
There speaks the brainwashed Apple consumer!
>>There is no way Apple would release a product without some type of proactive testing
What the fuck is "proactive testing"? Is that the sort of magic testing that anticipates all possible security flaws in a product as complext as OS-X ??
>>Maybe you are used to that in the MS world.
Maybe you should get your head out of your ass and take a look at the real world.
A friend of Mine bought a broadband ready WINXP laptop at XMAS and it was unpatched, she only had a modem so it took a week or two of occasional dialups for the machine to become completely unuseable, requiring a total reinstall.
My Question : can she sue the store as the machine was not ready as it was unpatched?
On a lighter note I have a ADSL + NAT - works ok now I routed the 3 backdoors to nonexistant machines.
Presumably left in for rental comapanies and/ or the FEDs - two had default asswords one had a crypto call and reponse with a simple algorythm that Shimamora (of Mitnick fame) cracked.
Still when they patch all of the windoz exploits I expect we'll see some automated broadcast UDP packet exploits - want a secure system TURN IT OFF - PULL OUT THE CABLE.
I read here that bots in the UK nearly led to nearly half a billion dollars being siphoned off a Japanese bank.
The latest gadget news and reviews. www.absolutegadget.com
in Nelson's voice, "Ha! Ha!"
I am more interested in how high the percentage is per country. e.g. 3% (or 30% or even 300%) of ocountry A is poluted. Only then can you start to conclude that this is due to broadband.
Other countries are also very high in percentage of broadband, like Belgium.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
You are[,] number six.
So do computers in the UK just come with spamming software preinstalled, or what? The article was fairly useless.
I'm an American student studying abroad here in London, and one thing I have noticed is that port 25 isn't blocked outgoing at any of the places I've been online. While as a Linux user this is convenient because I can use my laptop's own smtp server to send mail without hassle, I'd rather they be blocking port 25 outgoing to prevent spam.
If you don't have port 25 blocked, you can expect to see a hell of a lot of spam bots on your networks, because they'll be effective.
-Jay
At least since corp 8.x (and for sure now on 9.x) you can have [the cetnral server or clients] check for updates every N minutes, and further have them check with symantec 'home base' a random number of minutes past a certain point (i use between 1 and 180 minutes past Thursday night)
you can even have the central server (if you use an av server to store def's locally) check "constantly" - and it warns you about the add'l bandwidth. that's even more frequently than the "N" minutes that my Kaspersky installs offer. (or your quoted software)
stop the FUD. if you install Corp AV without the MMC snap-in (and know how to manage it) you'll continue to be as ignorant as you are- have fun! But this is a user problem, not a software problem.
If she floats, she's a witch.
What is it with news reporting that they never attach a data appendix? C'mon guys. We wanna know:
# bots worldwide
# broadband computers worldwide
# bots in UK
# broadbanded computers in UK
[repeat for US, China, Canada, Spain, etc.]
[then, for kicks, break them down by OS]
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4369185.stm
Yup.
By the factor of 4 or 5 to account for the population difference? That might be tough.
Also, I think your reasons for adoption in the US are dead wrong. DSL is down to $30/month, which is only $7 more than AOL I think. The problem is mostly last mile with DSL. Not sure what issues lie with cable.
As for seeing the need, all it takes is for someone to try it once at a friend's house. No more waiting for the modem to connect, DC's, and general slowness (which is relative to creeping webpage bloat...grrr...).
... are quite tecnically knowledgable?
ROTFL!! WTF r u smokin?
Maybe you mean "many" like in "at least several dozen"?
99% of Windows users are technically incompetent. They couldn't tell a virus from a spyware, a firewall from a modem.
Let c be a positive constant, then
a < b iff a/c < b/c.
As a consequence, sorting by the largest quantity hacked is *equivalent* to sorting by the same number divided by the worldwide number of bots (= c).
70% of bot networks reside outside of North America; however, these self-same bot networks are largely controlled by American hackers! Yet another example of American hegemony over the rest of the world...
...and while I was more than a little incredulous, I was breifly quite pleased the USA wasn't the top of someone's hate list.
For example, Dugald https://ocm.mtsadvanced.com/help/adsl/res_dugald_m ap.html has a population of is less than 12000 http://www.granite.mb.ca/erdc/springfield/dugaldco mm.html
There is even service to tiny places like Miami, Manitoba http://www.cici.mb.ca/miami/. Population: 400+. And this is not just some crap broadband. We are talking of up to 5Mbps/400kbps for about US$50
... when its Chelsea :)
Yesterday Apple machines, today UK. Seems the Symantic business development managers are trying to drum up more biz.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Yes there has been an increase in broadband users.
However it may also be the case that dial-up users can least afford to download critical updates for their supplied OS. Here are the usual complaints:
"My PC is getting so slow these days, I think I need a new one"
"Why is dial-up so slow these days?"
I started getting a lot of infected spam recently, so I did the following:
1. Checked all the headers for the souce IP addresses.
2. Used dig -x to find the source ISP.
3. Compiled an abuse report and sent it to the ISP.
The common source was in fact a broadband service.
Those infected and spoofed messages seem to have stopped.
I got talking to someone who was learning about computers at night classes. There was no mention of software firewalls or anti-virus....
My hyperlinks aren't worth the paper they're printed on.
0wn3d.
Yahoo is at fault.
1000s of chat rooms
100000s of bots advertising websites that have trojans
Yahoo can stop it easily, but they ARE LAZY
Does yahoo have any staff or is it just a website now?
The ISPs don't want people to have NAT in their ASDL/cable connections because they want to discourage them from using networks behind the NAT, presumably they expect people to sign up for second broadband connections like they used to sign up for second phone lines...
What's worse, when the next big P2P app comes out, expect the ISP support offices to be overloaded by open-port-requests. It would be costly, and you might not want the average support person to know what P2P app you use. Of course the net admin can know if he wants, but currently no one would care unless you use way too much bandwidth.
One workaround is to make the ISP's firewall settings configurable online by customers, but this might not be feasible now. Before that, I prefer to have the option of having all ports open and take all the responsibilieis myself, at no additional cost.
Antivirus and Firewall packages on their own don't work. I got asked to look at a family PC that had BT yahoo dialup. The father had got the protection 'package' - CA etrust Antivirus and BlackICE firewall (an extra £3.5 (~$5) a month). The blackice didn't seem to be doing anything (application control was turned off) and the antivirus had stopped updating - which was why I got asked to look at it. The problem was all spyware - The family had no idea what it was - Of course with a PC with XP and no service packs installed you can guess how many hundreds of piece of spyware/virii were installed. I tried to talk them into Firefox, Zonealarm/Kerio Firewall and AVG Free/ClamWin Antivirus but I just couldn't find a way to expain it so they understood and would accept. In the end I just cleared the spyware (mostly manually - Ad-aware, SB-S&D and MS Antispyware just wouldn't completely clear it) and viruses. Installed XP SP2 and all the updates. Did a full inoculate with SB-S&D and spywareblaster. Bet I'll get another call in 6 months to a year!
To Slashdot or not to Slashdot. That is the question (that will cause me to fail an interview)