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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.'"
Hopefully they get so absorbed in rubbing eachother out that the rest of us can just get on with business as usual.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
This seems like a target-rich environment for black hats to "do business" in.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
..."I blame George Bush".
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
That's funny, I thought Africa was?
"Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
Seriously, when I first started reading the post that's exactly what I was thinking! I feel like I might be a little prejudiced in jumping to that conclusion...
Oops, how did this get here?
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...When you won't allow people to update invalid copies of your software with security fixes. Quite honestly, Microsoft has to bear its share of blame in this. If they would simply make ALL security fixes available to all users no matter whether their copy is legal or not, we might be able to mitigate this problem to some extent.
I'm perfectly willing to admit, however, that you can't make people patch their OS if they don't want to do it.
---don't make me break out my red pen.
It's as simple as "apt-get update-all"
Thank you, thank you, I'll have another show tonight and two more on Saturday. Refer a friend and get 50% off the price of admission.
What if somebody is simply zombying Beijing servers and/or desktops? It just may mean they have the most zombies, not that the actual perpetrator is there. It would still be considered lax security either way. Unless perhaps some big virus shop chose Beijing as their frame target because of China's already poor reputation in this area such that nobody would look elsehwere once traced there.
Table-ized A.I.
and let me guess, the "UK-based managed security services company Network Box" is trying to get into the Chinese market?
From what I've seen you have spam, mostly targeting English speaking Americans and Europeans and you have worms targeting anything with a fast connection, for use as a bot. I suspect that even if China was suddenly all using Red Flag Linux, worms and spam from China would still target the US.
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".What version of Linux on the desktop do you run? My Kubuntu install pops up a nice GUI when updates are available, and that was the default configuration. It also applies to a lot more of the userland software than Windows update does. I find it a lot easier to keep up to date than my Windows install.
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.I think you're mistaken here on several points. First, every study I've seen and the non-public data I have from work shows the majority of infections are from worms that do not involve user interaction, not from trojans. There are a lot more types of trojans, but they just don't spread as quickly and widely as fully automated attacks. If you're counting by infection instead of by number of malware variety, trojans are not the biggest threat.
Second, I do think the design choices of the major Linux distros are more secure than Windows for the most part, but that is not the reason why Linux will always have less chance of malware infection than Windows. Innovation, including innovation into security, is driven by market forces. Windows is a monopoly. When a Windows box is compromised, MS does not lose any money and very, very, very rarely lose any customers. Linux, due to its licensing, will never wield monopoly force in the market, thus it will always respond to the wishes of the users, who also happen to be the developers for the most part. If malware attacks against Linux were to increase in frequency enough so that Linux had to face the same level as Windows, Linux would not fare all that much better at first, but it would quickly develop better security features to mitigate the attacks, probably starting with an SELinux type approach combined with human generated white and grey-lists and some sort of an open verification scheme. User space versus root is not the most granular level of security on all Linux boxes today and if trojans became an issue on Linux, that would expand to consumer desktop systems.
Now just imagine in the future when phones become general purpose computers, not subject to reprogramming by the phone service provider. That's going to be billions of rooted computers. Yikes.That all depends upon how many OS's and providers for phones their are. If there is a monopoly, yep we'll have terrible security and it will be a mess. If we have a healthy market with multiple competing players, I don't think it will be a serious problem.
I caught some serious viruses last time I was theer
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
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.
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
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.
Now look at Ubuntu.
By default, you are a less privileged user. You have to do RESEARCH on how to log in as the root account. And the people who are most likely to be a problem are the least likely to do the research. This limits the trojan and virus threat.
By default, there are no open ports. This limits the worm threat.
People can STILL manage to get their Ubuntu machines infected. But it takes a LOT of work on their part and it's very easy to clean them.
Once the infection rate falls below the disinfection rate, the "threat" dies.
Microsoft is TRYING to get around to doing this. But they're still learning. Maybe Vista +1 will follow Ubuntu's lead.
To guard their citizens against these virus threats, the Chinese government should create a giant firewall and put all their machines behind it!
Oh wait...
( ^_^)/
The creid card companies mantain a tight reign on what there licencees can buy and sell. If you fall out of line, your access is cut off io hours. New sites may pop up daily, but its not that easy to get a merchant account. You have to provide an insane amount of documentation - typically directors of the company to have to hand over passports, marriage licences, firstborn sons, etc. If evidence of promotion via spam was grounds for cancelling merchant accounts, and the credit card companies were required to enforce this, then it would stop because it would be pointless. Currently the credit card companies make millions from spam, and will not act against it unless forced to by the government, because they are required by law to act in their shareholders best interests.
I sure as hell want your freedom to have your fellow countrymen send me several thousand spams a day promoting illegal, fake goods curtailed. You are free to provide me your e-mail address so I can forward all my spam to you if you like.
I assure you that educating people, while worth trying, fails on the PT Barnum test - "there's one born every minute".
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
"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 on 2.47 percent."
As a Turkish guy I would like to state that we don't have any city/town/place called Turk in Turkey. But we have around 65 million Turks living in Turkey. I am really sorry that we don't have a place like the author said but I'll contact the authorities immediately to build a new city named Turk and place all spammers/virus writer in there so you don't have to change your post. We're benevolent people.
Couldn't it be diverted from it's propaganda goals to also filter for malicious traffic?
You mean censorship? Propaganda is what you read on sites like Slashdot. Both are bad, but they are not to be confused with each other.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
How is it that the Chinese are so good about keeping out what they don't want their culture to learn about the rest of the freedom loving world, and so incredibly lousy about keeping in what they shouldn't be spreading to anyone else?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Try to live here without buying anything from China. It's gonna be tough, especially if you want to buy shoes or electronics without parts or assembly in the PRC. Here's an interesting article about it.http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1220/p09s01-coop. html
We are all just people.