Bonum Certa Men Certa

FBI Eliminates ~12,000,000 Windows Zombies Botnet, But Hundreds of Millions Remain



Summary: The latest Windows botnet crackdown is just a drop in the bucket and Microsoft Windows is once again just a keypress away from full compromise

A FEW days ago we wrote about just one large Windows botnet being addressed. It appears as though the FBI was involved. The FBI too has suffered from Windows malware, even internally [1, 2].

More details have emerged about a cybercrime investigation that led to the takedown of a botnet containing 12m zombie PCs and the arrest of three alleged kingpins who built and ran it.


That's just peanuts. 12 million Windows zombie PCs are less than 3% of the world's estimated total. To botmasters, there are still hundreds of millions of Windows zombie PCs to pick from.

“Users of Windows currently have to worry about hitting a particular physical key.”"Monster botnet held 800,000 people's details," says this other new report, so these Windows zombies have already caused theft and huge damages that are hard to measure (according to some estimates, the cost may easily exceed a trillion dollars in total, for Windows botnets as a whole). It is estimated that about one in two Windows PCs is is a zombie PC [1, 2], with Microsoft itself putting the optimistic bar at about a third (2009 figures).

Two days ago we wrote about the F1 flaw, which is now confirmed by Microsoft. It shows that nothing is improving. Users of Windows currently have to worry about hitting a particular physical key.

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