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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."
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.
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.
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You know, this is sort of like when the US comes out #1 in road accidents or gun crime or something bad like that. We tend not to celebrate. Look on the bright side: Your beer is better than ours. If it weren't so hard to find in my area, I'd drink nothing but Bass.
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
41% of British Internet connections are broadband or other always-on connections, and 4% use a mixture of access methods. Leaves 55% who are exclusively modem users.
I appear to have a blog. Odd.
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.
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
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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'.
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
I read here that bots in the UK nearly led to nearly half a billion dollars being siphoned off a Japanese bank.
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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