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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.
This has been obvious to me ever since Wolfenstein 3D almost 14 years ago.
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!
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.
Really? We have internet here in The Rest of the World? Thanks for noticing!
550 : Recipient address rejected: cleric casts repel undead at spam zombie;
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).
Fascinating. But what is a "worm" or a "virus"? Did the article define those too?
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
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.
Europe Home to Majority of Zombies
Which explains the smell.
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.
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
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
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.
... ...
I got better...
I for one welcome our new Zombie overlords.
Nah, do the real change, Replace the MS for an X in MS Windows and most of your actual problems will dissapea... well, may come others, of course, instead of being zombie you could become r00ted, 0wned or h4x0red and pass a lot of time trying to undestand what those extrange words with numbers mean.
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.
[rant]If you "generally consider the internet as USA only", that probably says a whole lot more about you than it does about the internet. Are you aware you wouldn't even be reading /. if it weren't for the Swiss CERN, creating the WWW? Do you know that broadband penetration is as high (if not higher) in many EU countries as it is in the US? Don't you think it's about time for many Americans to drop the conceited attitude, and to look around and notice they're not alone on the planet?[/rant]
That being said, according to TFA, The origin of the zombie machines may change on a daily basis as machines can be infected anywhere in the world. CipherTrust has found that during April and May, the largest percent of zombie originations have alternated between China and the United States. In addition, during the first three weeks of May, approximately 26% of daily new zombies originated in the European Union, so let's not jump to any conclusions about Europe's supposed backwardness here. The figures may very likely show an entirely different picture again tomorrow, as they apparentely did just a few weeks ago.
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.