Comments

• Yuhong Bao

  2010-04-16 23:51:47

  "Windows PCs Brought Us a Trillion SPAM Per Week… and It Gets Worse" would be more correct title for this.

• Yuhong Bao

  2010-04-17 00:02:49

  Even better would be to add the word "Botneted" at the beginning too, but that makes the title slightly longer.

• Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  2010-04-17 00:09:22

  Can that not be assumed? About half of all Windows PCs is said to be “botnetted”.

• Yuhong Bao

  2010-04-17 01:02:42

  Well, "Botneted PCs" would be an alternative too. Anyway, any of these titles would be better than the current title, which incorrectly blame MS for the spam.

• Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  2010-04-17 01:15:44

  Systemic neglect is Microsoft's fault [1, 2, 3]. Microsoft does not patch known holes until the attacks begin. We wrote a lot of posts about this in January [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12] since a known Internet Explorer hole that Microsoft had ignored for 5 months caused enormous damage to many businesses, Google included.

• Yuhong Bao

  2010-04-17 06:17:34

  That is a different issue though, and far from the only cause of botnet infection.

• your_friend

  2010-04-17 06:23:59

  Microsoft is to blame for spam. Almost all businesses that use Windows have a Botnet problem.
  
  

  Up to 88% of Fortune 500 companies may have been affected by the Zeus trojan, according to research by RSA's FraudAction Anti-Trojan division, part of EMC. The trojan installs keystroke loggers to steal login credentials to banking, social networking, and e-mail accounts. ... Smaller companies (those with fewer than 75,000 employees) appeared to have a higher proportion of infected employees.

  
  
  My bet is that 100% of computer networks with Windows are infected and that the missing 12% are so well captured that those watching are unable to tell.
  
  Blame for this universal failure can only be laid at Microsoft's feet. Either the whole world administers Windows incompetently, or Windows is hoplessly insecure. If it were possible to secure Windows, the majority of Fortune 500 companies would not have a problem. No other software has this kind of problem.

• Yuhong Bao

  2010-04-17 21:30:37

  "My bet is that 100% of computer networks with Windows are infected and that the missing 12% are so well captured that those watching are unable to tell." I would not go that far, but when crashes after installing a kernel security update turned to be caused by a rootkit, I read on Slashdot and other sources that there were many who did not know before that their system was infected.

• Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  2010-04-17 21:35:29

  Very few know that. I've met people who think that if a virus scanner says the "PC" is clean, then it must really be clean.