Counting tells you if you are making progress

Thu Feb 22 18:13:25 UTC 2007

On Wed, 21 Feb 2007, Todd Vierling wrote:
> I'd say it's severely biased in the overestimation direction -- but
> that's not to say it isn't a problem, because zombies Suck.

People with access to the ppp, dhcp or nat logs for a network can de-dup the 
counts based on IP addresses to come up with better surveys of infected 
computers.  They can further correlate the reports with contact
with the computer owners of how many computers were found with known or unknown 
malware. But we rarely hear data from them.

Although I disagree with some of the survey counts, finding zombies isn't 
a problem.  Figuring out if a computer is actually fixed and stays fixed 
is still the problem.  Sometimes it feels like an episode of "House." 
Except House wraps up the case in 60 minutes.