Fergie's Tech Blog

U.K. town a global contender in bot battle

Jeremy Kirk writes in InfoWorld:

If you told residents of Winsford, England, that their personal computers had been turned into an invisible electronic army, they'd probably think you're mad.

But the 33,000-person town in northwest part of the country reportedly has one of the highest rates of computers infected with programs that receive and respond to commands from other remote computers. These "bot" networks can then be used by attackers to perform DoS (denial of service) attacks on other computers and act as spam generators.

According to Symantec's Internet Security Threat Report released earlier this month, the small town of Winsford had 5 percent of the world's infected computers, second only behind London at 8 percent and ahead of Seoul at 4 percent. Overall, the U.K. had about one-third of the 1 million to 2 million infected computers worldwide, Symantec reported.

Symantec speculated in a March report that the size of a city and the rate of broadband growth are related to the number of computers infected by bots. The rapid expansion of broadband facilitates the distribution of malicious software, including bots, it said.

But why would Winsford -- a town that initially developed because of the salt mining industry -- hold rank with London and Seoul, two cities with populations many, many times greater than its own?

posted by Fergie @ 9/30/2005 09:21:00 AM