December 31, 2006
Number of Computer Bots Down – Merry Christmas
Written by: Juanchito
I think that the bot nets that are being created by people are completely fascinating. I know I’ve had a couple of my servers become part of the bot net in the past and it makes for a fun experience searching out who it was that was using your computer and how they got in. Yes, it was on linux and a quick redo of the server put it back into production with no bot running in no time. Luckily I was in a position to redo it.
I didn’t know they were tracking this, but a recent report said that the number of bot infected PCs is down from more than 500,000 infected systems to less than 400,000 computers.
They are attributing this drop in bot infected computers to Christmas and the purchasing of new computers. I wonder if they also thought that maybe there were a few hundred thousand computers that are at people’s place of employment that are now turned off because no one is at work. It’s probably both.
I think this quote is telling of how important this news is:
“Many of the infected machines are turned off, the new shiny ones have not been infected, and the Internet is momentarily a safer place,” Marcus Sachs, director of the ISC, stated in a diary entry. “But like you said, give it a few weeks and we’ll be right back to where we started from.”
Maybe it’s not important. However, it is interesting!!
Guess the ones who selected me didn’t get the memo. I had my first spambot attack on Christmas day. Took me hours to go all the way back to my fisrt blog post and delete them all. It’s probably unneccessary to say that I’ve now enabled moderating and word verification.
Thanks for visiting my blog. Hope you’ll be back soon! I always appreciate your advice on the forums.