Zombie Network Explosion

anti-globalism writes "The number of compromised zombie PCs in botnet networks has quadrupled over the last three months. Shadowserver tracks botnet activity and the number of command and control servers. It uses a variety of metrics to slice and dice its figures based in part on the entropy of botnet infections. The clear trend within these figures is upwards, with a rise in botnet numbers of 100,000 to 400,000 (if 30 day entropy is factored into equations) or from 20,000 to 60,000 (for five day entropy)."

Comments

How can you tell if a box is zombied?

[oldspewey]

Honest question - without resorting to answers like "if it's not running Linux it's zombied" I'd be curious to know how the average user can even determine whether their box is pwn3d.

Riddle me this...

[davmoo]

So if researchers can detect these things with apparent reliability in their process, why can't ISPs detect them the same way and cut the bastards off?

If Comcast and ilk such as that were really interested in conserving network bandwidth, they'd be cutting off zombies instead of putting on bandwidth caps.