Zeus Finds USA As Safest Haven

Almost 40% or 39.8% exactly of the Internet sites that Zeus perpetrators are utilizing for controlling and commanding the notorious botnet are hosted in the USA, researchers from Trusteer a security company state based on a research that lasted 4 years.

Following USA it is Russia, home to 21.6% of all Zeus-infected systems. Thereafter Ukraine with a 6.5% rate is at No.3. In general, countries within Eastern Europe are havens for 32% of the total operators of Zeus.

But, this does not imply that no other country is Zeus prone. For, China (3.5%), Malaysia (2.6%), Canada (1.3%) and Iraq (1.3%) as well as Germany (4.3%), the Netherlands (3.5%) and the United Kingdom (3.5%) within European Union, too account for Zeus-hosted websites.

Stated Trusteer whereas big sized nations experienced the maximum infections, emerging countries' statistics indicated a certain model for their own.

Moreover, according to the company, narrowing the list to Internet Protocol addresses, which anyone could access during the recent 80-day period, indicates that the infection rates in the USA and Russia declined whereas there were considerable numbers of Zeus C&C (command-and-control) websites in the extremely small sized Herzegovina and Bosnian countries.

Interestingly, the Trusteer experts as well determined the places where accessible websites utilized as Zeus command-and-control environments were present. Nearly 33% of such areas were in USA during the last 80 days, while UK was low at 6%.

Remarking about these discoveries, Trusteer through its report stated that the statistics in a greater way indicated that the worldwide usage of the Internet was rapidly getting extremely diversified; however, as more and more online systems of automated servicing and registration were used it implied that there was less and less human supervision of hosted mechanisms within countries that had improved Internet access. Itpro.co.uk published this on February 3, 2011.

Trusteer concluded that along with pulling down the expenses associated with hosting, the above had a disturbing impact in that it became very simple to register as well as establish a Zeus-infected and/or C&C website together with associated systems and utilizing the same for contaminating Internet users on a wider scale.

Related article: Zeus Trojan Stole Huge Amount of Information

» SPAMfighter News - 2/10/2011