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."

Comments

Wow, a .6% lead

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how accurate these statistics are.

Re:Wow, a .6% lead

[dominator]

What I find it interesting is that a country with 1/4 the US's population and with a roughly equivalent standard of living represents a roughly equivalent percentage of the world's hacked PCs, even if the difference between the UK and US is within this poll's margin of error.

Is the US public that far behind in broadband connections? Is the UK public engaging in more risky computing practices? Are US ISPs blocking more 0wn3d boxes? Are the UK ISPs incompetent, overwhelmed, or more laisse-faire?

Statistics.....

[wpiman]

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.

Re:Statistics.....

[tabkey12]

But considering US has 4.5 times as many people - the fact that the UK is that high at all is very worrying.

Re:Statistics.....

[Monkelectric]

Well, if you think about per capita, the UK has a much worse problem. However, I think what theyre really saying is, "sales of symantec products poor in the UK."

Maybe the brits just know that symantec has been a joke for years.

hacking abroad

[cwebb1977]

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.

Bad Broadband

[epiphani]

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.

Symantec Security Studies...

[Onimaru]

...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?

Re:required skills

[DigiShaman]

Having a licence required would cause the PC/Internet access industry to plummet. And because of lack of consumer investment, progress in newer technologies would slow down.

Ya, spyware sucks ass. But I'll just let the free market take care of this. Until then, I'm willing to take the good with the bad.

Just thought

[cca93014]

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...

Re:It's called a hardware NAT router

[ka9dgx]

NAT doesn't solve the problem, it merely hides the symptoms of the bigger picture:

• The users expect an appliance, and don't want to be sysadmins
• The company that likely created the OS is driven by marketing, and the need for features over stability
• The programmers that wrote the code were under pressure to meet deadlines, and just get it shipped.
• The language chosen to write the OS and applications in is weakly typed, and prone to holes.
• The security model of the OS based on access control lists, which are insufficient to meet the challenges of mobile code
• The internet service providers are under economic pressure, and have insufficient resources to track down and take offline all of the compromised machines
• Hardware has gotten so fast that sometimes its just not perceptable that a machine is a zombie, until it gets quite overt
• The globally distributed nature of the treat makes it almost impossible to isolate and address with the court system
• The economic incentives to take over your machine increase daily, as more creative (profitable) uses are found for it.
• The barriers to entry that do exist are constantly being lowered as new tools become available to script kiddies, etc.

When you go with NAT, you fundamentally break the end to end nature of the InterNet, and you don't solve any of the above problems.

NAT is a band aid at best, and the end of the InterNet at worst.

--Mike--

It's the modems!

[GuerillaRadio]

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.

Re:True story about a non-hacked Brit's parents

[CdBee]

We need a site called geek-exchange so people like us can swap inconveniently-situated tech problems (ie, I fix your mum's PC if you do my cousin's....)

It'd save us all an awful lot of driving.