Research Indicates Beijing Is World Virus Capital

An anonymous reader writes "The Chinese capital city of Beijing is now a global leader in distributing viruses. According to UK-based managed security services company Network Box, Beijing accounts for 40 percent of all viruses that passed though the company's servers in June, and 5.25 percent of detected spam. This compares with slightly lower percentages for cities in countries noted for having a malware problem. Moscow was second for spam with 5.12 percent, Seoul third with 3.58 percent, Turk in Turkey fourth with 3.4 percent, and London in fifth place at 2.47 percent. 'As more and more users come online in China, there's a good chance those computers are using pirated software without up-to-date security fixes, making them prime targets for hackers who are actually located elsewhere in the world, [Simon] Heron said. Those compromised computers, which are used to send spam and make it more difficult to identify the spammer, are so valuable that hacker gangs have been competing to take over machines. If one gang finds a machine running another gang's Trojan horse program — one that appears harmless to the victim but can be used to control a machine — they'll try to remove the software.'"

Comments

Who mod'ed that "interesting"?

[khasim]

Since linux is even harder to keep patched automatically it would not be a better situation (Flame me if you wish but please don't say something moronic as "its' as simple as "apt-get update-all".

Well, it seems that the moderators are as uninformed as you are. Imagine that.

Most current distributions AUTOMATICALLY check for updates.

And they do NOT require "Windows Genuine Advantage" or any such crap (unless you're running Novell). Ubuntu does this flawlessly.

And even if you believe that linux is more resistant to holes than windows that's not an issue: Remember most of these bots come in as trojans not remote execution exploits, and they don't even need to run as root--so linux is not going to be more secure against trojans people welcome into their user spaces.

Actually, at the moment it appears that the majority of NEW infections are coming from holes in IE.

Zombies send out spam telling you that you have a greeting card at site 123.321.123.321 and when you go there, IE is cracked.

So, running Linux WOULD prevent that.

And regarding trojans, Linux makes it FAR more difficult to run software WITHOUT specifically intending to do so than on Windows. So Linux is more resistant to trojans.

Go ahead and claim that just because it is possible for a sysadmin to fuck up his system despite all the precautions otherwise ... well, you know what you're going to attempt to claim.

The fact is that Linux is far more resistant to viruses, trojans and worms.

And that is sufficient because it appears to drop the infection rate below the disinfecting rate. So the threats die because they're cleaned faster than they can spread.

But we've gone over this before and we'll go over this again.