The Attack of the Zombies
No, this is not a “B” rated horror flick. This is about something even scarier. We’re talking about computers being hijacked in order to replicate the dastardly deeds of viruses, worms, Trojan horses, spam and more.
This is about computers under the remote control of hackers and crackers so as to hide the real source of the attacks. This is about criminals being able to direct and coordinate attacks from thousands of computers at the same time at any target or targets of their choosing. These computers are being used to attack the rest of us.
- So how many computers do you suppose are hijacked each day?
- How are these computers hijacked?
What would you guess. Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Millions?
Come on now, make a guess before you click on “Read the rest of this Post”. How many computers are hijacked, worldwide, each day?
Well, the answer may astound you. Remember, we are talking about each DAY.
According to CipherTrust, the creator of the ZombieMeter (sm), each day of the last month (May, 2005), an average of over 172,000 new zombies were identified worldwide, per day.
That adds up to over five million computers converted to remote control zombies last month alone!
And we wish to point out that the ZombieMeter apparently only detects zombie computers that spew Spam email. There are undoubtedly thousands of computers that have been zombied for other purposes.
Check out the ZombieMeter here:
http://www.ciphertrust.com/resources/statistics/zombie.php
by Internet-Insecurity.com
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- Practice Safe Computing -
