04.15.10
Microsoft Brought Us a Trillion SPAM Per Week… and It Gets Worse
Summary: Some new statistics about SPAM, courtesy of Google
ABOUT a hundred billion E-mail messages sent per day are said to be SPAM, spewed primarily by Windows zombie PCs (some sources say that numbers now exceed a trillion SPAM per week). Google says that things are getting worse, not better. [via IDG and Slashdot]
The spam data cited in this post is drawn from the network of Google email security and archiving services, powered by Postini, which processes more than 3 billion email connections per day in the course of providing email security to more than 50,000 businesses and 18 million business users.
“Spam will be a thing of the past in two years’ time,” said Bill Gates in 2004. This prophet is now busy working on other projects, hoping to accomplish the attainable while making a profit. █
Yuhong Bao said,
April 16, 2010 at 6:51 pm
“Windows PCs Brought Us a Trillion SPAM Per Week… and It Gets Worse” would be more correct title for this.
Yuhong Bao Reply:
April 16th, 2010 at 7:02 pm
Even better would be to add the word “Botneted” at the beginning too, but that makes the title slightly longer.
Dr. Roy Schestowitz Reply:
April 16th, 2010 at 7:09 pm
Can that not be assumed? About half of all Windows PCs is said to be “botnetted”.
Yuhong Bao Reply:
April 16th, 2010 at 8:02 pm
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 Reply:
April 16th, 2010 at 8:15 pm
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 Reply:
April 17th, 2010 at 1:17 am
That is a different issue though, and far from the only cause of botnet infection.
your_friend Reply:
April 17th, 2010 at 1:23 am
Microsoft is to blame for spam. Almost all businesses that use Windows have a Botnet problem.
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 Reply:
April 17th, 2010 at 4:30 pm
“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 Reply:
April 17th, 2010 at 4:35 pm
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.