U.K. town a global contender in bot battle

["Fergie (Paul Ferguson)" <fergdawg () netzero net>]

Jeremy Kirk writes in InfoWorld:

[snip]

If you told residents of Winsford, England, that their personal computers had been turned into an invisible electronic 
army, they'd probably think you're mad.

But the 33,000-person town in northwest part of the country reportedly has one of the highest rates of computers 
infected with programs that receive and respond to commands from other remote computers. These "bot" networks can then 
be used by attackers to perform DoS (denial of service) attacks on other computers and act as spam generators.

According to Symantec's (Profile, Products, Articles) Internet Security Threat Report released earlier this month, the 
small town of Winsford had 5 percent of the world's infected computers, second only behind London at 8 percent and 
ahead of Seoul at 4 percent. Overall, the U.K. had about one-third of the 1 million to 2 million infected computers 
worldwide, Symantec reported.

Symantec speculated in a March report that the size of a city and the rate of broadband growth are related to the 
number of computers infected by bots. The rapid expansion of broadband facilitates the distribution of malicious 
software, including bots, it said.

But why would Winsford -- a town that initially developed because of the salt mining industry -- hold rank with London 
and Seoul, two cities with populations many, many times greater than its own?

[snip]

http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/09/30/HNbotbattle_1.html

- ferg


--
"Fergie", a.k.a. Paul Ferguson
 Engineering Architecture for the Internet
 fergdawg () netzero net or fergdawg () sbcglobal net
 ferg's tech blog: http://fergdawg.blogspot.com/

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