Number of botnet’s victims has increased this year

McAfee, an anti-virus firm, released a quarterly report which shows that botnet criminals have taken control of almost 12 million new IP addresses since January. The United States has the largest number of botnet-controlled machines, with 18 % of them based here. The report represents a 50-percent rise of the number of zombie machines over last year. This rise is ascribed to botnet controllers trying to compensate spamming abilities after authorities took down a hosting facility last year that catered to international firms and syndicates involved in spamming and botnet control. Last year at this time, an average of 153 billion spam messages were sent per day, while numbers in March this year show that the rate was on average about 100 billion messages per day. But researchers say the spam numbers will return to normal as criminals re-build their networks of captured computers. U.S. took the first line in terms of the numbers of zombie machines by country following by China with about 13 %. After this, the numbers dropped precipitously to 6 % in Australia, 5.3 % in Germany and 4.7 % in the United Kingdom. Russia, where many cyber criminal syndicates are based, accounted for only 2.5 % of the compromised computers. But botnets aren’t only used for spam. A report issued by the University of California at Santa Barbara shows that a controlled so-called Torpig botnet stole about 70 gigabytes of data from computers remotely-controlled by the botnet, including financial data. The harvested data included 1.2 million Windows passwords and 1.2 million e-mail items, such as e-mail addresses and log-in credentials.