US Reigns As Most Bot-Infected Country

Trailrunner7 writes "The US has by far the highest number of bot-infected computers of any country in the world, with nearly four times as many infected PCs as the country in second place, Brazil, according to a new report by Microsoft. The quarterly report on malicious software and Internet attacks shows that while some of the major botnets have been curtailed in recent months, the networks of infected PCs still represent a huge threat."

Comments

Re:Microsoft Did the Report?

[DarkKnightRadick]

I take that back. Not only do they report which OS, but claim their count by how many computers their malicious software tool has cleaned. lol

ALL RIGHT !! USA NUMBER 1 USA! USA! USA! USA!

[Anonymous Coward]

Eat that China. You suck!

Quick Question

[Monkeedude1212]

How many computers total are in the US compared to other countries of the world?

Simple counts don't cut it in the real world of statistics.

I bet 100% of Canadian computers could be infected and we still might not beat out the US. Considering the Population of California alone is greater than our national population (or at least it was last time I checked).

Re:Quick Question

[tacarat]

Real statistics don't cut it in the world of headlines.

Re:Quick Question

[martin-boundary]

Simple counts don't cut it in the real world of statistics.

Huh? It entirely depends on what the statistics are being used for. Simple counts are useful when the amount of activity is proportional to the population size.

For example, with a botnet, it's the absolute number of bots that matters, because the bots in a botnet are interchangeable (it doesn't matter where they're located, or what processor they're running, etc).

So if you're going to propose botnet solutions on a per country basis, then you want to know which country has the greatest number of active bots, not the country which has the greatest percentage of infectected computers.

Re:I read the TFA

[Unoriginal Nick]

The US is most in absolute numbers. In rate per 1000, Turkey has the highest rate.

True measure

[__aagmrb7289]

This report is not a good measure of anything. It only counts botnets cleaned by Microsoft's program, and it doesn't talk about infections per capita. It measures nothing, and is pretty close to useless. Yay. Okay, that's not totally fair - there is useful information in it. But the article has very little of that information, and the summary has none of it. Now, yay.

Re:I read the TFA

[T Murphy]

The actual Microsoft report has a map that is far more informative than the article itself. As expected, Brazil has a higher infection rate than the US, with the US only leading by gross number of infections. Of course, this data is just number of infections detected and cleaned- it isn't necessarily a complete survey. From the site where the map is given:

Figure 15 [the map] shows the infection rates in locations around the world using a metric called computers cleaned per thousand, or CCM, which represents the number of reported computers cleaned for every 1,000 executions of the MSRT.

The actual site is here if you want to get straight to the information (link is also given in the article).

Re:US Reigns As Most Bot-Infected Country on Web

[ColdWetDog]

So can someone explain why this is news? Sounds more like it reflects the number of computers in the country!

Look, as an American, it feels good to be the bestest at something for a change. We're desperate, we'll take anything.