Davey Winder
Monday, 28 July 2008 15:55
Business IT -
Security
Page 1 of 2
No longer the stuff of low-budget movies, zombies are invading the Internet: around 10 million of them in the last three months alone. The horror is revealed in a new report which shows that Google Adwords and Microsoft users brains are amongst the most sought after zombie food...
We all hate it, but spam has been around for so long that it has become
if not a truly accepted part of Internet life then at least one that we just
begrudgingly deal with. The trouble is, as a new email threat trend report issued by
Cyberoam today indicates, spam no longer wants to
just sell you stuff it also wants to suck your brains.
Spam and email based malware is on the up, and
the Cyberoam report shows that there were some 10 million zombies
active during the second quarter of this year pushing that infected rot
in our direction.
According to the report authors, the vast majority of zombie IP
addresses are dynamic and the zombie botmasters have managed to succeed
in causing large scale damage simply by deactivating the IPs causing
the new attacks and switching instead between multiple other IPs in
order to bypass traditional security solutions.
Internet Service Providers have been targeted by the zombie botnet
masters who have exploited ISP infrastructure in order to send out the
spam payload. No wonder there have been people complaining in support
groups that outbound email is getting blocked, as happens when IP
ranges get abused in this way.
Any ISP worth its salt should not, of course, be vulnerable to such
open mail relay problems. The users of those that are will quickly
discover that as well as not having the most reliable of email delivery
services, the zombies will drain ISP network resources and slow network
speeds as well.
But it is not just service providers who have felt the force of the 10
million strong zombie army. Google Adwords and Microsoft users
have also been particularly hard hit, the study reporting that attacks
on these users have hugely increased.
How are the zombies attacking email users brains? Find out on page 2...
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