India Secures 20.85% World Record for Zombies

Internet security firm, Commtouch released its latest 'Internet Threats Trend Report- 'October 2012'. As per this new trend, that India ranked first in the list of the compromised computers in the world. The report claims that India represents 20.85% of world spam sending 'Zombies'.

A Zombie may be defined as a computer linked to the internet that has been attacked by the hacker. In a computer language, computer virus or Trojan horse can be employed to undertake malicious task of a particular type or another under isolated direction.

Pharmacy still remains the topmost topic for spammers whereas; education and shopping websites were used to implement malware according to the report. The Internet world witnessed about 87 Billion of daily spam/phishing emails accounting to almost 74% of all e-mails sent. The number of e-mails attached with malware stood at 1.9 Billion.

A striking development in the third quarter of the year (July 2012) saw the taking down of the Grum botnet as a joint effort of FireEye assisted by Spamhaus and other industry experts along with network operators around the world. Around two weeks time was taken for this take down as the command and control servers were taken offline and then replaced by the botnet owners. Command and control servers left in Russia and Ukraine however were the last to be shut down by July 22, 2012.

Nevertheless, with the destruction of the FireEye, the number of spam messages dropped to 51 Billion, which is yet the lowest number recorded during the last 3 years. Unluckily, the situation prevailed only for a short period and after a few days, spam levels were back to normal, highlights Commtouch.

According to the report of this quarter, gmail.com once again spotted the topmost position as a spoofed domain. Social networking and mail sites including AOL, Yahoo, and Facebook are the top most popular social networking and mail sites. However, ever-present ups.com and dhl.com were favored for the malware attachment attacks.

Related article: India Remains an Easy Target for Hackers in '06

» SPAMfighter News - 11/1/2012