One In Twelve PCs In The UK Are Part Of Bot Nets
After spending a whole day in a security workshop, I’ve been on the look out for security related stories and I’ve just seen one that scared the life out of me. Despite the huge amount of education we in the ISP community have provided over the last couple of years, one in twelve computers in Britain have been compromised and are part of botnets.
Amichai Inbar, who has been identified as the fifth largest spammer worldwide, has been using a London-based internet company to control the networks of hijacked computers, The Times has discovered. He is believed to be in control of a network of 150,000 computers that he uses to send his own spam, or rents out the network to criminal gangs based in Russia and the US.
It’s a constant war between the teams who are developing better tools to detect spam, and the spammers who are trying to get around the protection using clever ploys like sending their messages as picture files that look like text, which now accounts for a third of all spam.
However, users have got to do more to protect themselves. If I get an email that makes it past my spam filters where I don’t know the sender, I don’t even look at it anymore. I just delete it as I get so much spam because of the 6 domains I own (I deliberately don’t clear out my spam folder to see how much spam I’m getting and in the last 30 days I’ve received 14,425 spam messages and it goes up by about 1K a month), that I don’t have time to check for false positives.
If we don’t fix email soon, I really fear it’s going to become useless and people will switch to IM or some other medium where you can only communicate with verified trusted individuals.
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