FBI Releases Results of Operation Bot Roast

coondoggie writes to tell us that the FBI has released the findings of their recent botnet study and have identified over 1 million botnet crime victims. "The FBI is working with industry partners, including the Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University, to notify the victim owners of the computers. Microsoft and the Botnet Task Force have also helped out the FBI. Through this process the FBI may uncover additional incidents in which botnets have been used to facilitate other criminal activity, the FBI said in a statement.Bots are widely recognized as one of the top scourges of the industry. Gartner predicts that by year-end 75% of enterprises 'will be infected with undetected, financially motivated, targeted malware that evaded traditional perimeter and host defenses.'"

Comments

getting a clue.

[twitter]

I don't know what "the relative risks" means, but since none of my Windows machines are in a botnet ...

I'd believe you if you were running some other software to monitor your network activity, but that's beside the point.

What I want from the FBI are statistics on botnet populations. How many computers are compromised and what steps were taken to secure them that failed. Michael Dell and Vint Cerf estimate that 25% of "internet connected" computers are part of a botnet. I think they have vastly underestimated the problem, that botnets are entirely Windoze driven and that most of the steps taken by people like you are ineffective. None of these things is really effective and using Microsoft's auto-update is the surest way to have your computer broken. The FBI is collecting and can provide some hard numbers to back up our assertions. If you care about truth, you want the numbers.

Maybe one of these days you'll inherit 800 million completely clueless users, and maybe then you'll call it a "Linux problem"?

Free software welcomes the people you and M$ despise, but there will be no equivalent monoculture for them and the problem will go away as it becomes increasingly more difficult and less profitable.