Slashdot Mirror
Europe Home to Majority of Zombies
Rei writes "According to a recent CipherTrust study, the majority of Zombie PCs reside not in the US or China, but in Europe. Of the European zombies, 2/3 were either in Germany, France, or Britain. The results were released with the announcement of CipherTrust's new ZombieMeter. As a response to previous reports of high zombie activity, the London Action Plan launched Operation Spam Zombies in cooperation with numerous governments around the world."
... as to where the evil clerics are.
it must be the food ... (canned Microsoft anyone ?)
Siropel
This has been obvious to me ever since Wolfenstein 3D almost 14 years ago.
From the article: A zombie is a machine--typically connected to a broadband connection and without any type of firewall or anti-virus protection--that has been maliciously infected by a worm or virus without the owners' knowledge and is used to launch Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and send spam and phishing e-mails.
Funny how it was published with a nationalist spirit this time...
What do you guys think?
-Block em. Make the people run anti- software and lose money!
-Don't block them! Make the internet a bad place!
Dashboard Widgets
this isn't surprising. While we generally thing of the internet as USA only, it does exist in other countries. Considering that the majority of hacker attack come from overseas (or so it seems), this does not come as a surprise. Maybe this is why the EU hates MS?
See why the EU is being so hard on Windows this time around?
Hasn't Hollywood taught us zombies are created in Europe? :)
Maybe even some like this...
http://www.repenetrator.com/
(not safe for work)
This just goes to show that no one knows where spam and zombies reside. Everyone's "research" (obviously riddled with bias) says it's some place else.
Voud u like to touch my zombie?
Call in Shaun of the Dead!
Ed: Any zombies out there?
Shaun: Don't say that!
Ed: What?
Shaun: The "zed" word. Don't say it!
Ed: Well... are they any?
Shaun: I don't see any. Maybe it's not as bad as all that.
Shaun: Oh, no wait, there they are.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
I expected something like this might happen some day, but I'm ready, thanks to this. Bring it on!
what to do:
;)
get off your ass and visit your "neighbours".
educate them while disinfecting and immunising their pc. drink coffee, shake hands - repeat.
oh and after the third time at the same house, don't even care to fix it anymore. just tell them to get a mac.
Top 10 includes the US at 28.5%. No EU country is in the top ten list. "during the first three weeks of May, approximately 26% of daily new zombies originated in the European Union, including 6%, 5% and 3% of new zombies originated in Germany, France and the United Kingdom, respectively." That's NEW zombies. The EU share of zombies is increasing, but it isn't the major source (yet).
Whether hacked computers and their clueless users or hideous undead out for brains, nothing beats the tried and true shotgun.
550 : Recipient address rejected: cleric casts repel undead at spam zombie;
(filler)
How do you know they weren't patched? Patching doesn't really help you when the user runs the executable attachment they got in their email, or installs something shiny they found on the web.
Back in the 1990s, Spam was a big problem. The problem was that a number of ISPs would ignore Spam complaints, or would even encourage spammers to be on their networks. Once enough ISPs refused to listen to complaints, Paul Vixie started the Realtime Blackhole List, which would allow people to find out if a given IP was blacklisted, and refused to receive email from a blacklisted IP.
I worked at Netcom when we ended up on the RBL. We did not have strong Spam protection; for example, our credit card verifier did not contact the credit card company before giving someone internet access. Even after being placed on the RBL, management was unwilling to expend the resources needed to stop our Spam problem; they thought the RBL would just go away. Meanwhile, the number of people calling or emailing technical support doubled because they could not send mail increased (I helped make some graphs showing the increase in emails to tech support to convince management that this was a real problem). It took months for management to wake up, smell the coffee, and make it harder for spammers to get throw-away accounts on Netcom's network.
(For NANOG regulars at the time: It was I who wrote the "Keman-bot")
A similiar list needs to be set up; if a given ISP has zombies and does not cut off said zombies from the internet, the ISP needs to be blacklisted RBL style. Maybe then management will do something about the zonbie problem--such as cutting of zombie machines from the internet (redirecting all HTTP queries to a "You're a zombie so we cut you off page" for example).
The XP firewall would normally catch most of these errant processes.
So either Europeans are too dumb to avoid clicking on attachments, or too dumb to apply patches.
Neither option seems very satisfactory if you are European.
Unless the trojan writer has it deactivate the firewall before it launches any internet communication...
This is garbage... governments use this stuff all the time. "operation spam zombies" .. that's nice, here in the u.s. it would be called "Operation Spam Freedom" or "Patriotic Eagle Soaring through the Sky liberating helpless victims of Zombie Tyrants + Freedom"..
Governments have gotta do this to make sure people continue to have faith in their masters.
I was working on the mail server today, and going through logs tracking a clamav/amavis problem.
I started to notice that...one...after...another...the buggers were connecting. We're not even a very big site (just got a bunch of mailing lists). The DNS names were xxx-yyy-zzz-aaa.(something).(insert european country code).
They outnumbered legitimate connections easily 5:1 or more, and the sessions all consisted of:
client: "HELO, I'm in your domain! Here, have some email"
Postfix: "take a flying leap."
client: "HELO, I'm in your domain! Here, have some email"
Postfix: "take a flying leap."
client: "HELO, I'm in your domain! Here, have some email"
Postfix: "take a flying leap."
Every single one would try and send between 3 and 5 messages before finally realizing it wasn't going to work, and disconnecting. It's irritating, because we do actually run a couple of DNS blacklists, but it seems a lot of european systems aren't on them.
When are we going to stop taking the "oh, we'll just filter it" attitude? Feels like all we've accomplished in half a decade is to do spammer's work for them and make users complacent by hiding all this shit from them. It's a classic white elephant problem if I ever saw it...
Please help metamoderate.
Maybe this survey is about Grade A zombies, not the Hollywood Grade B kind.
--
What, no human-bening detector?
anything named "operation" anything is propaganda
Yeah, cos Operation Overlord really sucked didnt it!
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
Europe Home to Majority of Zombies
Which explains the smell.
Remember. Europe is a continent. It's like saying that the world has the largest meat producing industries in the Galaxy, while comparing it to moons. Or something.
I thought most people saw 28 Days Later...
I want to know who in the hell allowed the French to have computers.
Everybody knows '28 Days Later' started out as a warning about the dangers of spam.
So too, if you own a computer and want to be part of a community of connected computers, not bothering to inform yourself of how to do that does not excuse your responsibility for whatever damage your computer causes.
So what we do to spam zombies is:
a) block them totally and stop them from causing any more damage
b) send them an email telling them how much it cost to clean up their mess (usualy around $500), and that we will bill them if they do it again
c) only unblock them when they give us their assurance they understand what the future costs may be an will never allow it to happen again
d) permanently disconnect them and bill them the full amount of sysadmin and helpdesk time and materials of they allow it to happen again.
It's a really tough line, sure, we have lost maybe 3 customers as a result in 18 months (average spend per customer is $34 per month), out of 20,000. But it is far, far cheaper that the cost of just letting it happen unchecked.
*Insert obligitory comment referencing zombies, and their relation to Europe in one form of media or another*
Remember who they're targeting: whether directly or through their ISPs, the owners of zombied computers. People who are either too gullible to resist clicking on pop-ups in IE, too ignorant to realize the dangers ActiveX pose to their computers, or too dumb to understand even the most rudimentary online safety concepts, or that even online there's no such thing as a truly free lunch.
I don't know about you, but I think "Operation anything" fits the bill perfectly in this case. You and I, we're not the ones whose acts they're out to clean up.
Maybe with mainstream attention called to the problem, they'll finally start listening when their ISP tech support keeps telling them to at least turn on their friggin' firewalls and stop disabling their antivirus because of all the "stupid virus warnings."
It must be Windows. It needs half a gig of RAM and a hardware-accelerated graphics card just to run Solitaire.
Well, maybe it would be a Good Thing(tm), then, if MSFT withdrew from the EU market??, (in suggested response here to the impending possible EU antitrust fine).
It's nice when evil outside of America is pointed at by the global community. Lord knows we have enough of our own zombies to deal with -- it makes me happy knowing that at least in the IT sector, they're coming from across the pond! That might help my depression. Probably not. *bang*
it's like those "other cities" all the teams that show up to lose to the Yankees
Oh, THOSE Yankees.
Thanks for clearing that up. (snicker)
The information that matters here is whether the European Zombies are classic slow moving "Romero" type zombies or modern "28 days later" type zombies.
This will tell us what we need to know in order to fight them.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Heh, the russians were tearing the Nazi's the shreds by the time that happened. If Hitler hadn't gone completely nuts and kept his end of the bargain with Stalin, d-day would have been an utter disaster for the brits/americans/canadians/aussies. They didn't get lucky, they just planned well, knowing Nazi hardware wouldn't be the deciding factor.
When I first saw this, I though oh cool something informative that I can forward to users during spam outbreaks.
Then I saw it was a vague graph that doesn't show up under Firefox.
I wondered would it show up on Slashdot, based on the premise of coolness, even though it sucks rocks?
Now I know.
This sig is alpha and shouldn't be viewed on production machines
Cole: I see dead people... ...They don't know they're dead
Crowe: In your dreams?
Cole shakes his head
Crowe: While you're awake?
Cole nods
Crowe: Dead people like in graves and coffins?
Cole:
Crowe: How often do you see them?
Cole: everytime I go to Europe, (pause) they're everywhere...
[sig]www.masterslate.org[/sig]
Man. If you could go back in time to 1980 and tell everyone that in 25 years, European governments would be spearheading an initiative called "Operation Spam Zombies", and that this name was not in any way meant to be humorous, the looks on peoples faces would be priceless.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Socal action? Here ya go.
Circumcision is child abuse.
well, duh. where do you think transylvania is?
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
It's true. One of them turned me into a newt!
Guns are outlawed in most of Europe, right? How will they defend themselves?
[o]_O
I thought typical zombies needed brains to live. These "zombie PCs" thrive even without them.
All together now...
USA! USA! USA!
In Soviet Russia, the Zombie is YOU!
Can you imagine a beowulf cluster of zombies? (Wow that works on so many levels...)
In Korea, only old people are zombies.
and of course...:
1) Lots of Zombies buy a Non-linuz operating system with a browser that has a blue E logo
2) ????
3) Profit!!
My Favourite Meme
I want to like Safari. But why are the documents generated by XSL transformations in 2.0/RSS so frickin' slow? Firefox does the transform and has the generated document onscreen almost instantly, and all is well. In Safari, it lags like the dickens.
-- YLFIOne god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
A newt?
nice revisionist history. the russians wouldn't have lasted had the US not given them the hardware to fight with. Not to mention Stalin BEGGED the Allies to open another front in Europe.
You must have been educated in a public school; right?
The zombies are a clear reference to the House of Lords, so the evil cleric must be the Blair Witch Project.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
There are other efforts (in addition to RBL style lists) to fix some of the problems which derive from the assumed trust that's built into the SMTP protocol. For a brief shining moment last year, I thought that we might all hold hands and sing together on this one, but Microsoft managed to drive of their early Sender ID adopters and alienate potential allies in the battle against spam by making vague patent claims and apparently refusing to even clarify.
Adoption of the Sender Policy Framework seems to have slowed, probably caught up in the confusion around Sender ID and the Microsoft patent claims. The linked site claims that SPF is unencumbered.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
The USA have a population of about 300 mio people, Europe one of 800 mio people. So it might be no surprise, that there are more infected PCs in Europe ...
Go here for a free service from if you have real control of your email server's ip address:
http://postmaster.msn.com/
The geek shall inherit the earth.
from TFA:
"Using a tool that can track zombie machines, CipherTrust found that 26 per cent of them were hosted in European countries, with most of them in Germany (six per cent), France (five per cent) and the UK (three per cent)."
so now the article establied that the *most* infected country is Germany, with is 6%. now the immediate next paragraph:
"The company's ZombieMeter found that hackers were hijacking around 172,009 computers every day. Approximately 20 per cent of those machines were based in the United States, and 15 per cent were found in China. CipherTrust did not provide details of where the attackers resided."
and US account for TWENTY percent compare to Germany's SIX percent. Even China's FIFTEEN percent is higher. I don't mind it do a country by country comparation, or even a continent by continent. I wonder what's the overall percentange if you really compare it continent to continent. I wonder what's the overall percentage of Americas, Europe, and Asia is...
but IMHO grouping Europe all together and compare it against nations like US and China is just wrong.
These European zombies only eat...Cycles
Sometimes at night I imagine the darkness is filled with horrible things with too many teeth, like Julia Roberts.
... ...
I got better...
I got better.
I like mine fried, stired, and fried again.
Mmmmmm, zombies.
I for one welcome our new zombie overlords.
"With rare exceptions people cannot use that picture to masturbate, therefore it is not the internet."
The problem with SPF is that it doesn't stop spam. It stops Joe jobs (forged emails where some innocent person gets a bunch of bounces and auto-replies), but doesn't stop hit-and run domains and what not. SPF is also needlessly complicated, is vulnerable to DNS forgery attacks (if you control the reverse DNS lookup of a given IP, you can fool SPF), and makes using a given email address from a mobile internet connection more troublesome.
The other issue is that there is a lot of nastyness done with zombies, such as Wiki-spamming (This is a popular target), DDOS attacks, and what not that SPF doesn't address at all.
You fail it!
http://postini.com/stats/ has better maps.
It's not just "stupid people" who have zombied machines, who operate open proxies, who allow unlimited anonymous connections to their machines...
As nations crack down on the free exchange of information of all sorts you can expect this type of activity to rise. It's called "creating plausible deniability." Not everyone knows the details of how the internet works, but everyone knows if you have sub7 on your machine and you're caught doing things your government might frown on, you've at least got a chance of defending yourself.
Not a suprise to me at all, Europe's lack of reason explains it all. Bunch of Zombies themselves that depend on the government to tell them whats best instead of acctually thinking for themselves. Should expect the same for computers. Bunch of socialist morons without a clue of what personal responsibility is. Maybe they should visit this, http://www.lp.org/, more often.
...from the weekly "America is a technological backwater because other more densely populated countries with large government subsidies have more broadband penetration in the big cities."
:)
Coincidence?
Based on the number of zombied Windows machines that I see getting worked on at multiple corporate sites as well as home systems that I'm having to fix for friends and family. Seeing that I live in the U.S. where the average IQ is 109 and 51% of the voting public votes for Bush, it's not a surprise that these people can't keep their PCs secured. When I visited France, I found the average person there to be far more intelligent than the average American. In general the entire month I was there I saw NO zombied home PCs. That's right. Not one. None. Zero. I asked my French colleague how many home PCs and office PCs he's having to clean and he said the number is very small indeed. Serge assured me that most of France's IT folks are always trained in security at the outset. He also explained that in many homes and offices French people have made the move to Linux and Windows has a decreasing market share there.
Europe as a whole is completely different from the U.S. since it's population is much more educated and enlightened. Therefore this report is just more lies and propaganda from the Bush administration controlled media. Consider the source.
Makes sense really considering EU has a higher linux usage rate, especially in germany :-). yeah yeah I know flamebait.
So should I be cheering for my country (Australia) to get up to the top of the list or not :)
they are all zombies with all their legalized weed smoking and techno trance listening
No question about it, the parent poster is an idiot.
"The newly born animals are then whisked off for a quick run through a giant baking oven." --heard on Food Network
A continent has more zombie PCs than a country ... ..n dex.php
Shocking that
http://www.ciphertrust.com/resources/statistics/i
Event hough the statistics infact disagree with the report..
I think we have some odd reporting here , IT should be that may saw the largest rise in Zombie PCs in Europe .
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
they get infected by Rage
First few words I read I thought it was real zombies we're talking about. That made me reaaaallyy doubt about one of my neibhours..
/.!
Then I realised the article is talking about zombie PC's.. *wheeew!*
Dont trick me anymore
No more I say.
The one responsible for all the zombies...
The Reanimator!!!
(warning, addictive silly music ahead)
Well, duh. Everyone knows the people in 28 Days Later had funny accents.
Do not outlaw circumcision. It's a part of my religious beliefs, and I'm happy I was. If I wasn't after I was born, I would do it now. I will also circumcise my sons as well.
.. they can't speak english. If i kept getting emails (with attachments) in Polish i'd probably open one eventually....
actually, i probably would't - but it's a thought.
Also remember, just because a country is in europe it doesnt mean they are cutting edge of tech. There are a few that have only just moved on from mut huts and eating children for christmas.
C'mon... its no shock that a number of a europeans still scream and thow spears at the 'soul sucking' machines.
I guess this ignorance is better than London. You pull out a laptop on the tube you can say hello to a blackeye and good-bye to your powerbook.
we have a long way to go baby.
I for one welcome our new Zombie overlords.
it's incontinent.
Such a "study" is merely a measurement of broadband penetration. There is no relevancy in grouping trojaned PCs per country, continent, or whatever, and not doing the same with the secured and uncompromised systems.
Maybe their next study is going to point out that the majority of torjaned systems run Windows XP?
Monty Python's Holy Grail....
Let's face it, Europeans are basically Socialist morons, unable to fend for themselves in the real world. They'll just sit around letting their computers get infected while they wait for mommy government to step in and take care of them.
(Which usually works out great -- btw, how many old Frogs are going to die from the heat this August while the whole country goes on vacation? Think it'll hit five figures this year? We should start a pool.)
Europe Home to Majority of Zombies
Well, of course. Just ask Shaun about them!
The spamhaus xbl is meant to be an RBL of spam zombies.
Just compare the number of broadband lines in the respective geographies http://www.point-topic.com/content/ukplus/email+ar chive/wukbbmm3050406.htm and you find that these figures tie in pretty well - if anything the USA is more spam productive compared to Europe!
The solution is to do like Verizon did - just block all mail that is from Europe - after all who would want to talk to anyone from Europe?
As ever there are lies, damn lies and statistics.
China has a population of about 1.3 billion. The USA has a population of about 295 million. South Korea has a population of approximately 48 million, less than a fifth that of the US, and under 1/20th that of China, yet it has about half the number of zombies of the US.
Proportionally South Korea is by far the worst offender on the list.
How difficult is it to keep your OS up to date and run virus scanners?
The "May Top 10" chart on CipherTrust's web site of course features the "European Union", yet on the same list we see Germany, France, UK and Spain, all member states of the EU.
EU has 460 million people. USA has 300 million people.
Assuming the same level of spread of Internet access, the EU should have 1.5 times more zombies than the USA.
The site mentioned in the article shows that in May, EU had 1320985 zombies and the USA had 964020. That means the EU has 1.37 times the zombies of the USA, despite having 1.5 times more people.
In 2004, Internet usage rates were at 47% in EU and 52% in the USA.
Conclusion: the zombie rates don't vary between USA and Europe. Population, on the other hand, does vary. Therefore, you can expect the EU to continue to have more zombies than the USA. Also, as China's and India's internet usage grows, they will probably pull ahead in the stats.
Disclaimer: The numbers were pulled from various sites online using Google for searching. If someone has conflicting figures one way or the other, I wouldn't be surprised.
Populations:
o rder/2119rank.html o mbie.php
EU : 457million
USA: 296million
Zombies in May:
EU : 26.16% (1320985)
USA: 19.08% (964020)
So, zombies per capita:
EU : 0.00289 (1 zombie per 346 people)
USA: 0.00326 (1 zombie per 307 people)
Sources:
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/rank
http://www.ciphertrust.com/resources/statistics/z
Do not outlaw ritual deflowering of virgins by the High Priest. It's a part of my religious beliefs, and I'm happy I was. If I wasn't after I started my period, I would do it now. I will also have my daughters ritually deflowered as well.
...mmmm, brains!
Fortunately, they are from the UK, France and Germany, so no problem here(Denmark) :-)
Hell, we might try to persuade our dumb people to go there, yeah, that would be so nice...
-H
Well then...I'll be sure when going to Europe to pack the right guide...just in case
0 049628/qid=1117706602/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/102-6130 001-2949707?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/140
What kind of moron compares one country against a group of several countries? What kind of comparison is that? Look at the individual numbers:
U.S. - 20%
Germany - 6%
France - 5%
U.K. - 3%
Only by lumping everyone together as "Europe" are they able to claim that the majority of zombies are not located in the U.S. Even though I live in the U.S., I find this article totally stupid.
you don't mention the growth of number of zombies in the EU.
if group A is 30% big and group B 70%, group B is bigger.
if group A is growing at a rate of 50% and B at 10%, A eventually will get bigger.
since your quote doesn't mention growth in the EU you just can't compare them based on growth.
Privacy is terrorism.
Take a look at these folks:
http://www.dshield.org/
With some relatively simple scripts you too can run a cron process that filters through your logs and sends a list of odd connection attempts to dshield.org.
Maybe a particular IP address only tried to connect to your machines once or twice. Eh, no big deal. But through the power of the database, when that same IP address tries to connect to a few hundred(thousand) machines once or twice, a pattern emerges, and they can even send automated "Hey, clean up your customers!" messages to the registered abuse addresses.
It's not perfect (most ISPs don't do anything with the information), but it's something, and doesn't require a lot of work on our end.
How To Survive A Zombie Attack
Noise Is Music Podcast.
Well this is just great. First Google turns eval, now we have zombies taking over Europe. Whats next?
"What does slashdotting mean?"
"You've never heard of slashdot?"
"I know it makes websites not work."
Europe has less obscenely fat people than the USA...
realkiwi
All the reports say the spam problem is worse "over there", with "over there" being decided by the report writer. Rather than falling for the distraction let's look at the common denominator: MS still needs constant tinkering, it's not for amateurs or home users. Use OS X, BSD or Linux instead.
MS is like the old style Harleys. You know the ones from decades ago, before the retooling, where you had to have your toolkit with for any serious road trips. Neither is practical for your casual user.
Even recent versions like XP, still aren't ready for the desktop. Though some claim that XP about even with KDE. For home users that surf, check e-mail, listen to music, watch DVDs and maybe edit a few digital images, there's no need to waste time and money on a system which required esoteric knowledge and constant tinkering. A machine with a pre-installed and pre-configured Linux distro or OS X will save home users AND their ISPs weeks of headache per year. And, unless your time is free, this means substantially less burden.
For businesses you get economy of scale. Plus, zombies are not your only threat. If MS can read your business files and mail so can your competitors.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Seriously, I've always thought to myself "A horde of Zombies would never stand up to group of Ren Festival Nerds!" since they'll never run of out ammo seeing they will just keep hack/slashing away and zombies can't bite through chainmail.
Unless your the cheap kind of Ren Fest kind of person and get the plastic armor.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
This is the first, and probably last, time a US citizen is able to say that to Europe. As a side note, the number of trolls on Slashdot is on the rise.
Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Teach him to fish and he'll wipe out the species.
Any ISP that doesnt have a virus checker on their mailserver in this day and age is a crappy ISP (either that or they are too cheap to buy a copy of whatever virus checker is available :)
...) ...
...
... in the above text with more actual information)
the big email providers like hotmail and yahoo already scan for viruses (gmail doesnt scan for viruses AFAIK, it just throws away anything potentially executable)
That alone would stop most sources of infection for the newbie (unless its been compromised by a hacker, its unlikely that any respectable website is going to be installing viruses on your machine)
Combine this with a set of clear instructions that any newbie can follow that is issued to every new customer. Something like:
WARNING: Your PC is at risk of infection by viruses and worms. Infections can do any of the following nasty things:
Steal your personal information (including information that could be used to steal money from your bank account, take out a credit card in your name, read private communications or
Delete important files on your computer (which could result in your computer becoming inoperable or the loss of important data)
Steal files and data on your computer (which could include private stuff you dont want anyone else to see/read)
Make your computer run slower and take longer to do things
Enable your computer to be used by hackers to attack other computers
To prevent infection, take the following steps:
Install a virus scanner and run it regularly
Do not open files that are sent to you by email except from people you know and trust as they could be viruses
(repace the
Basicly, it would be a short blurb that your computer is at risk from viruses and trojans.
Then something explaining what a virus is and what nasty things it can potentially do. Anything that any virus has done is potentially fair game (we want to scare the newbie users into thinking that viruses are nasty nasty things so we want to think of things that newbie computer users would be fearfull of and use them here)
Then, after that, clear steps on how to prevent infection, how to tell if your computer is infected and how to clean up your system if you do get infected (including how to set things up to check automatically so you dont have to remeber to do a scan every week). This should include details of where to get virus checkers (including the online scanners and the various free checkers you can download, in case people dont want to spend the $ for software like Norton or Mcafee).
And it should mention stuff about keeping your virus checker up-to-date too.
The bit at the top should be in BIG letters and really clear words so people will notice it and then realize that this is important and is something they need to read.
We start by scaring people into thinking that the internet is full of nasty viruses and worms which will do all these really bad things.
Then we show them how to prevent viruses in ways that dont require much effort on their part (especially ongoing effort)
Is a thought dat it was in de Islands mang? Or maybe down in da Louisiana.
Yeah, cos Operation Overlord really sucked didnt it!
;)
Well... "Operation Land on the Beaches and Get Shot at for 9 Hours by Angry Germans" wasn't as inspiring to the Allied troops going off the landing craft.
That and the original name "Operation Pink Butterfly" got voted down by Monty and Patton.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
People of Europe (especially Germans): That email that promises sexual bliss is a zombie load. I know this will be tough for those Germans, but, just delete porn mail.
Is there a simple way for me - a non-tech - to determine if my PC has been turned into a Zombie?
While a boom to the European continent, this will be devastating to the Carribean economy.
Isn't this a repeat of a previous article? Less than a week ago?
That one featured details from Prolexic/DigiDefense.
Your car analogy is interesting and understandable, but flawed, and represents the similarly flawed thinking on the part of ISPs. It puts the blame on the driver of the car, but it fails to account for the fact that every driver must first be LICENSED by the government. If you don't prove at least minimal profficiency at operating a motor vehicle, then you don't get a license.
To apply this analogy to PCs & ISPs, it would then be the responsability for the ISP to make a customer prove that they know how to keep their PCs 'safe' before they are allowed to connect to the 'net. An interesting stance, but also one that would most likely induce potential customers to go elsewhere.
Given the distributed and 'personal' nature of PCs, it is highly unlikely that any government, or even a concerted effort by all ISPs, could enforce some kind of manditory minimal 'PC Security Profficiency' policy. There are simply too many PCs scattered over the world, and it also fails to account for the actual source of the problem, the hackers themselves. Think that they would comply with any laws?
This battle must be waged by ISPs, and managed by the internet infrastructure. ISPs are the gateway to the Internet, and so they become the front line. The rest of the net infrastructure (DNS system, authentication, et al) must also adapt to allow ISPs to effectively fight. The technology providers need to fight this battle, not PC owners.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Still more Zombies per capita in the US than Germany and Britain. France is on par with the US.
Many new viruses are not recognized by virus scanners and get passed over by them. A lot of spreading can be done in the many hours between when a virus is reported, a definition for it created, and the email virus scanners machines updating with the new definition list.
Do not open files that are sent to you by email except from people you know and trust as they could be viruses ...
Sorry dude, but that is moronic advice. Most email viruses these days scan your computer for your email programs address book and send themselves to everyone in it. You are VERY likely got get a virus sent to you from someone you knows email address. I tell my users not to open any attachments, even from people they know, unless they are specifically expecting that attachment. Otherwise take two seconds, email the person back, and make sure it's real.
No that is what the Russians actually believe and Americans think they won the war and tend to even discount the efforts of UK holding out alone in 1940 ;)
Historically, it was a mix of everyones effort and the poor decision making process of the Axis.
You could say Hitler lost the War in the Fall of 1941 by failing to take Moscow before the winter came in before the US even got involved with sending supplied to the Soviets (they were giving lend lease to the UK at the time in full force).
In 1942, the victory at Stalingrad did benefit from extra supplies but it was mostly won directly through shear loss of life. The Soviets lost about 3 million men in the battle while the German and their allies lost somewhere around 300,000. Some victory eh?
However, the Soviets actually were contemplating a white peace with the German in 43 or least threated so to the Allies at Yalta (sort of) saying they might be satisfied with a return to the 1939 borders is the Allies didn't attempt an invasion on continetal Europe.
This said we won't really know what would have happened if the Allies didn't invade or not. Would the Soviets actually win and then push on to France or would they just make their way to the border of Poland and declare victory and go home or without Allies support would they have given up at Kursk in 43 and ceeded the Ukraine and other vital regions to the Germans?
On the Flip side if the Germans were not fighting the Russians then America would have had way more casualties than 500,000 in the war that's for sure. The Allies in France and Italy were only facing 25% of the German forces while the Russians were facing the brunt of the rest. Than and Germans also had 90% of their casualties on the Eastern front. (That said Germans had greater amounts of troops surrendering en masse on the Western front... Well mostly because POW camps in the US and the UK were more pleasant than labor camps in Siberia).
That said it was a collective effort on both sides (mainly while the US paid for victory in material and while Soviets paid for with blood).
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Its pretty rampant, and we're noticing a gradual increase as weeks go by. More and more "different" attacks, worms, zombies and probes are happening. I can't ban them fast enough, because at this point, there are over 3,200 unique IP addresses that we've found so far.
Reporting it does nothing anymore. Since providers are getting so many abuse@ complaints, many of them are just sending them to /dev/null. Not a smart move.
I've started working on a process to auto-report the trash as it comes in, and for providers that reject the "abuse@" address, I block them too. If your customers are abusing our production services, and you don't allow us to report that abuse, we'll just lock you out. Piss off if you can't control your own customers or your own network.
So far we've done this for about 900 separate IPs, and about 200 full /24s. We also block the entire country of Brazil (the whole 200.0.0.0) on 25, 53 and 80.
Either we'll block the whole Internet, or providers will get so many complaints from their users that they can't get to sites they used to, that they'll begin to investigate.
Newt Gingrich
you stupid cocksucker. Learn to read.
The sentence is prefectly clear, 26% of Spam Zombies are in Europe, the largest percentage of of the European Spam Zombies are in Germany (6% of the worldwide total).
-An operation through which zombies' computers are spammed with junk mail.
-An operation involving feeding zombies the nation's supply of spam, so that they satiate their hunger for flesh.
-An operation involving throwing spam at zombies for some reason.
The possibilities are endless!
Many Bothans died to bring you this sig.
Is there a tool to determine if your machine is a Zombie?
Seriously. What would be the best way to know this?
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
European Union:
Number of countries: 25, Population: 460 million, Number of Zombies (May figure): 1320985
USA:
Number of countries: 1, Population: 295 million, Number of Zombies (May figure): 964020
So, the EU has a fair few more zombies than the US, but the US is the single country with the largest number of zombies, and has more zombies per head of population than any other country (including the EU as a single block).
I'm sure it's just as easy to knock down my stats as it is to undermine the ideas presented in the article, but then as Churchill once said, "there are lies, damn lies... and statistics".
Funny, that.
hmm sounds suspiciously unlike an isp and more like a - oh whats the word - rez net?
see just because your in charge of a small to medium sized network, doesnt mean that you work for an isp. it means the school is cheap and took whoever offered.
if you tried those kinds of draconian mesures at a real ISP you would be fired for losing customers. banning people from portscanning? on a 10/100 network? LOL
vlan the sensitive equipment or hmm DONT MAKE IT INTERNET ACCESSABLE?
But the sign says, "Do not feed the zombies."
Given that Europe's population is comparable to the US, and much smaller than China's, what possible objection could you have to grouping the European countries together?
Sean
If your time is not valuable or you're not concerned about actually getting work done, than MS-Windows is just fine. It'll keep you off the street. If, on the other hand, you are more concerned about the computer as a means to get work done, than look elsewhere than MS
Anti-virus and firewalls don't help much. If your application or operating system can't live securely in a networked environment w/o a firewall then it shouldn't be connected to the network anyway. Besides, many (most?) of exploits nowadays come through ports the firewall must leave open. e.g. outgoing port 80 for MSIE.
MS won't back port anything, those sales are already made. The services packs for the remaining, supported versions are another problem. If they included only the patches needed to improve security, that's one thing. But they usually include all kinds of undesirable changes to configurations and to licensing.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
I don't constantly tinker with Windows, My work box I don't think I've tinkered with month and my home box I haven't tinkered with either. Unless you include patching Windows "tinkering" or configurating a 3rd party app tinkering. My Windows 2003 server doing IIS, Mail and DNS hasn't been tinkered with either except for yet again patching.
I have my conceal handgun permit, for the same reason I have my firewall. I probably don't need it but why risk it? Name the last virus that has come through firewall and attacked IE without IE being on web. If I need my computer to get work done I will most likely either sit down at my WIndows XP desktop or my Mac OS X laptop. I will never sit down at my Linux box to actually do work because it drives me nuts. Linux makes a great server and crappy desktop OS in my opinion.
Do not outlaw taunting happy fun ball. It's a part of my fun, and I'm happy when I taunt happy fun ball. My son likes to taunt happy fun ball as well.
> I will also circumcise my sons as well.
Idiots will be idiots. That's why the law should prevent them from hurting others.