Panda warns of global scourge

Johannesburg, 01 Feb 2008

Bots are a threat to any poorly secured computer or network and have become a global scourge, says Panda Security (SA) CEO Jeremy Matthews, and the problem also affects this country.

He says half a million computers are now infected by bots daily. "Bots are malware that go resident on a computer awaiting commands from their creators, who can take complete control of the infected system.

"Once they have control over several hundred computers, cyber-crooks can hook them all up to create botnets."

Approximately 11% of computers around the world are part of these botnets, and they are responsible for 85% of all spam sent. Panda uncovered several tools last year that are used by cyber-crooks to administer networks of thousands of infected computers across more than 50 countries. Matthews identified "Zunker" and "Barracuda" as two of these.

"The bot herder - the creator of the botnet - can rent out the network to the highest bidder," he adds. "Cyber-crooks that hire these networks use them for a wide range of criminal activities, including downloading malware onto infected computers or causing denial of services, although one of the most frequent activities is sending spam."

Panda says as a result, junk mail was one of the major threats of 2007, with more than 50% of e-mail received by home users being spam. In the corporate environment that percentage ran at between 80% and 95%.

"To get an idea of the scale of the problem, it would take around 2 000 terabytes of disk space to store the total volume of spam sent in one day," says Matthews.

The subject matter of this junk mail is varied. Sexual health was the most popular theme during the first quarter of 2007, accounting for 54% of all spam detected. In the second and third quarters, pharmaceuticals topped the list, with percentages of 45% and 30%, respectively.

In terms of the origin of junk mail, 59.72% is sent from Russia, while 23.08% comes from the US. Turkey (6.12%), Germany (4.77%) and the UK (3.16%) are other countries from which a significant percentage of spam is sent.