Botnets

Whilst clearly a plug for its security products, the recent Microsoft Security Intelligence Report (microsoft-botnets) is an eye-opener concerning botnets. A botnet (also known as a zombie army or hijacked computers) is a number of Internet computers that, although their owners are unaware of it, have been set up to forward transmissions to other computers on the Internet. According to Microsoft, over two million US PCs were found to be part of botnets in the first six months of 2010. Brazil had the next total level of infections at 550,000, with relative infections being the highest in South Korea where 14.6 out of every 1,000 machines were found to be enrolled in botnets.