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China experiencing fewer bot infections

According to the government of China and the country's independent security investigators, the total numbers of PCs and botnets that bot-herders control in China have declined over the past few years, although the most number of compromised PCs continue to be hosted in this country.

Botnets or networks of infected computers under an attacker's control, according to security experts, are commonly utilized to dispatch bulk spam mails as well as malware. In addition, they could be utilized for unleashing 'distributed denial-of-service' attacks when a group of hijacked computers would be commanded to link up with a chosen server simultaneously and flood it with so many queries that the Internet-connected computer would eventually shut down.

Last year (2008), more than 1.2m PCs in China were brought under a botnet's control, about 33% of the number of 2007, states a report from CNCERT (China's National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team).

Said senior director Prabhat Singh for McAfee Avert operations in the countries of Asia-Pacific the total number of Chinese computers added to botnets had varied over the recent quarters with an overall tendency to fall. PCWorld published this on July 10, 2009. Mr. Singh said new infections continued to be constant from Q1 to Q2 2009 at 1.6m.

Giving the reason why new bot-infected PCs declined in China, CEO Zhao Wei of KnownSec a security company in Beijing said that a lot of free anti-virus programs had become available online that enabled an increasing number of Chinese computer users to adopt them. PCWorld published this.

Moreover, CNCERT too discovered that the total number of command-and-control servers regulating Chinese botnets had dropped. The number declined sharply from 6,660 in 2007 to 1,825 in 2008, the report by CNCERT states.

Disturbingly, although there are fewer bots in China, yet the country is one of the top spam producers in the world. Further, for many years most of the alleged bullet-proof hosting facility has been coming from China, through which cyber-criminals paid their ISPs for ignoring complaints.

Encouragingly, as China experiences a decline in bot networks, the country is likely to enjoy a better cyber reputation globally.

Related article: China’s Best Initiatives To Deal With Spam

» SPAMfighter News - 7/27/2009

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