Autonomous Intelligent Botnets Bouncing Back

coomaria writes "Thought that 2009 was the year botnets died? Well, think again: compromised computers were responsible for distributing 83.4% of the 107 billion spam messages sent around the world every single day this year, and it's going to get worse if intelligent and autonomous botnets arrive in 2010 as predicted."

Comments

Re:What OS?

[Mattskimo]

You're right. I should have written "I guess someone, somewhere is probably running a compromised virtual machine or running the code in WINE." That being said, although WINE isn't a virtual machine, for everyday purposes it looks like a duck and goes "quack"...

Re:What OS?

[marcosdumay]

I'd be more inclined to separate OS into "Administrator by default" and "User level account by default".

Well, that is a nice dimension, tough not very usefull anymore (as you have stated). A few of other candidades would be: "Executes by mime" (Windows) vs. "Executes by permission" (everybody else), "Filetype by name" (Windows) vs. "Filetype by contents" (everybody else), "Automatic execution of received programs" (Outlook) vs. "Manual execution of received programs" (everybody else), "scripts inside everything" (Windows, MS Office, Internet Explorer, Acrobat reader, software that tries to be compatible with MS Office) vs. "scripts inside executable files" (other OSs, other text editors, free PDF viewers) vs. "sandboxed" (Other browsers, other spreadsheets), "security dialogs every time" (Windows) vs. "security dialogs are always dangerous" (everybody else), and my favorite "doesn't tells the user what the hell is happening" (Windows) vs. "tells the user what the hell is happening" (everybody else). Note that the later one is the cause of voodoo computer usage.