NSP-SEC

Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu
Mon Mar 22 02:03:11 UTC 2010


On Sun, 21 Mar 2010 21:37:09 -0000, James Bensley said:
> On 19 March 2010 14:19,  <Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu> wrote:
> You *do* realize that
> > there's an estimated 140,000,000 bots on the net, right
> 
> As many as that? Thats 1 in 12 according to

That was Vint Cerf's number as of 2007 or so. He dropped that estimate at
a major keynote address, and for the next 2 weeks, every security expert
out there was going "OK, who's going to tell Vint he's full of it?" - but
nobody could find non-laughable countering estimates.

Want a more depressing number?

http://blog.trendmicro.com/1h-2009-malware-threat-grows-ever-larger/

"TrendLabs has seen this continued growth of malware. The effects on users is
clear: in the first six months of 2008, the Trend Micro World Virus Tracking
Center (WTC) recorded that 253.4 million systems were infected with malware.
The comparable volume for 2009 is almost double at 491.2 million."

The mind boggles.  I would appreciate it if somebody would find the massive
statistical error that inflated those numbers by a factor of 5 or 10. (Note
that number probably includes adware and spyware as well as full-blown zombies,
but any adware or spyware that can phone home can at least in principle upgrade
itself to a bot if desired..)

Operational impact: For close to half of your customers, the billing address
no longer matches the effective owner's address.
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