Bot Infections Surges to 1.2 Million

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I have noticed an increase in Spam activity lately, especially in Spam blog comments there has been a noticeable surge in the frequency and number.

That’s why we’ve implemented stricter measures against spammers on Darknet and our other sites.

It seems there has been a big raise in the number of bot infected systems, so it’s suggested you ramp up your anti-spam filters and get ready for the onslaught.

The number of compromised computers that are part of a centrally controlled bot net has tripled in the past two weeks, according to data gathered by the Shadowserver Foundation, a bot-net takedown group.

The weekly tally of bot-infected PCs tracked by the group rose to nearly 1.2 million this week, up from less than 400,000 infected machines two weeks ago. The surge reversed a sudden drop in infected systems–from 500,000 to less than 400,000–last December.

A pretty big change in the numbers.

The threat to Internet users from bot nets has steadily increased over the past few years. Increasingly, computer systems in China have become infected with bot software and used to attack or spam other targets, according to the latest Internet Security Threat Report published by Symantec, the owner of SecurityFocus. Spammers have taken a shine to bot nets as a way to reliably send stock-touting e-mail campaigns and other mass mailings of junk advertisements. Worms are rapidly being replaced by Trojan horse programs, such as the misnamed Storm Worm, that use a bot net to spam out more copies of the malicious code.

As far as I know the stats are collected by Shadowserver, the guys who are battling the botnets.

Wonder how many of these hosts are Linux based machines, I guess not many.

Source: Security Focus