Data finds over 1 m UK Home PCs Belonging to Botnets

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has reported that a Dutch security researchers’ group trying to determine methods by which compromising of home PCs can be lessened from getting criminally used, recently, discovered that crime botnets seized over 1m home computers in UK. Incidentally, botnets are described as collections of online PCs, which intermediary parties hijacked as well as used maliciously over the Web. Thenextweb.com published this dated December 5, 2011.

In the meantime, considering that some 6 per cent of the total 19m online PCs in UK are included in botnets, cyber-criminals find it convenient to disseminate spam better with a simultaneous capability of striking websites as well as gathering bank information out of unwitting people’s computers.

And while the researchers’ team collected the data from numerous sources, the majority was taken from ‘spam traps’ referred to false e-mail ids created solely for getting junk e-mails. Understandably, over 90% of e-mail junk gets dispatched via botnets as also the bot-networks’ IP addresses very well indicate the location of the remotely controlled systems.

Moreover, the Dutch security investigators, who examined the Internet addresses of the spam-distributing botnets, were able to track down the ISP of every infected PC. In addition they collected the data regarding the Conficker network-of-bots, a rather massive network, along with incident reports DShield a computer security firm prepared that showed other online malicious operations potentially emanating from network-of-bots.

Remarking about these fascinating discoveries, Prof. Van Eeten stated that the 3 compilations of data were distinctly different that indicated that actual numbers of infections were still more. Collectively, however, the data provided a fine understanding as to how severe the hazards of a botnet were. Bbc.co.uk published this on December 5, 2011.

Furthermore, ISPs and several agencies combating online-crime shared reports from the collected data, while finding it astonishing the extent to which botnets had become widespread.

Prof. Eeten told the broadcasting company that the ISPs quite unexpected the differences between the researchers’ data and their own. Actually, the differences emerged, according to him, due to these service providers not bothering to refer to the statistics available about their networks’ contaminations.