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Research Indicates Beijing Is World Virus Capital
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Jul 05, 2007 03:11 PM
from the they-totally-win dept.
from the they-totally-win dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Chinese capital city of Beijing is now a global leader in distributing viruses. According to UK-based managed security services company Network Box, Beijing accounts for 40 percent of all viruses that passed though the company's servers in June, and 5.25 percent of detected spam. This compares with slightly lower percentages for cities in countries noted for having a malware problem. Moscow was second for spam with 5.12 percent, Seoul third with 3.58 percent, Turk in Turkey fourth with 3.4 percent, and London in fifth place at 2.47 percent. 'As more and more users come online in China, there's a good chance those computers are using pirated software without up-to-date security fixes, making them prime targets for hackers who are actually located elsewhere in the world, [Simon] Heron said. Those compromised computers, which are used to send spam and make it more difficult to identify the spammer, are so valuable that hacker gangs have been competing to take over machines. If one gang finds a machine running another gang's Trojan horse program — one that appears harmless to the victim but can be used to control a machine — they'll try to remove the software.'"
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Like street gangs... (Score:5, Funny)
OMG (Score:2)
Oh, not that sort of virus.
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Go a month without China (Score:3, Interesting)
No surprise really (Score:5, Insightful)
This seems like a target-rich environment for black hats to "do business" in.
Windows versus Linux (Score:1, Interesting)
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Thank you, thank you, I'll have another show tonight and two more on Saturday. Refer a friend and get 50% off the price of admission.
Re:Windows versus Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
From what I've seen you have spam, mostly targeting English speaking Americans and Europeans and you have worms targeting anything with a fast connection, for use as a bot. I suspect that even if China was suddenly all using Red Flag Linux, worms and spam from China would still target the US.
What version of Linux on the desktop do you run? My Kubuntu install pops up a nice GUI when updates are available, and that was the default configuration. It also applies to a lot more of the userland software than Windows update does. I find it a lot easier to keep up to date than my Windows install.
I think you're mistaken here on several points. First, every study I've seen and the non-public data I have from work shows the majority of infections are from worms that do not involve user interaction, not from trojans. There are a lot more types of trojans, but they just don't spread as quickly and widely as fully automated attacks. If you're counting by infection instead of by number of malware variety, trojans are not the biggest threat.
Second, I do think the design choices of the major Linux distros are more secure than Windows for the most part, but that is not the reason why Linux will always have less chance of malware infection than Windows. Innovation, including innovation into security, is driven by market forces. Windows is a monopoly. When a Windows box is compromised, MS does not lose any money and very, very, very rarely lose any customers. Linux, due to its licensing, will never wield monopoly force in the market, thus it will always respond to the wishes of the users, who also happen to be the developers for the most part. If malware attacks against Linux were to increase in frequency enough so that Linux had to face the same level as Windows, Linux would not fare all that much better at first, but it would quickly develop better security features to mitigate the attacks, probably starting with an SELinux type approach combined with human generated white and grey-lists and some sort of an open verification scheme. User space versus root is not the most granular level of security on all Linux boxes today and if trojans became an issue on Linux, that would expand to consumer desktop systems.
That all depends upon how many OS's and providers for phones their are. If there is a monopoly, yep we'll have terrible security and it will be a mess. If we have a healthy market with multiple competing players, I don't think it will be a serious problem.
Parent
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But as phones become computers I think we'll also see all the hand-rolled specialty phone OS disappear and standard OS's, fewer in number, replace them.
So long as no one OS wields enough market influence that it can ignore customers needs, it does not matter. You could have 2 OS's each with 50% of the market, or even 1 OS, so long as it is Embedded linux, and because unhappy customers can fork it, you don't have to worry that security will be ignored.
This almost has to happen for develpers to develop apps.
I disagree. It is just as likely that development environments will evolve to target multiple OS's. We already have that on PC's with Java and Flash and several other environments, and that is where there
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I think you're confusing interoperability and consistency with sameness. The latter is neither necessary nor desirable.
Who mod'ed that "interesting"? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, it seems that the moderators are as uninformed as you are. Imagine that.
Most current distributions AUTOMATICALLY check for updates.
And they do NOT require "Windows Genuine Advantage" or any such crap (unless you're running Novell). Ubuntu does this flawlessly.
Actually, at the moment it appears that the majority of NEW infections are coming from holes in IE.
Zombies send out spam telling you that you have a greeting card at site 123.321.123.321 and when you go there, IE is cracked.
So, running Linux WOULD prevent that.
And regarding trojans, Linux makes it FAR more difficult to run software WITHOUT specifically intending to do so than on Windows. So Linux is more resistant to trojans.
Go ahead and claim that just because it is possible for a sysadmin to fuck up his system despite all the precautions otherwise
The fact is that Linux is far more resistant to viruses, trojans and worms.
And that is sufficient because it appears to drop the infection rate below the disinfecting rate. So the threats die because they're cleaned faster than they can spread.
But we've gone over this before and we'll go over this again.
Parent
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http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/ubuntu/configure-ho w-often-ubuntu-checks-for-automatic-updates/ [howtogeek.com]
One of the nicest features of Ubuntu Linux is the automatic update feature, which helps you keep your computer updated with the latest software a
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And how many Linux users install programs outside their distro's repositories?
Under Windows, you can lure users to download your cursors, smiley collections and screensavers, because downloading from w
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The government of China has at least two officially supported Linux distributions that I'm aware of. They fund their development and promote them internally as well as internationally. It would be accurate to say that they've got some idea of the relative level of security that Windows and Linux provide, and have made their strategic choice.
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5. An extremely corrupt anything-goes-as-long-as-you-have-cash political infrastructure. And I don't mean people from wealthy family tend to be the ones who run for office (in the USA this refers to both parties). I mean if you don't give the policeman enough of a bribe that he bothers to arrest you for jaywalking/software piracy/industrial accidents/mass murder you can give something to the judge and still get out of it.
In Before... (Score:5, Funny)
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Strange. (Score:2, Funny)
This is what you get... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm perfectly willing to admit, however, that you can't make people patch their OS if they don't want to do it.
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Microsoft definitely deserves the blame for having the security holes in their products, but your angle is really just high horse riding.
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Secondly, where do we draw the line if we go down your route? If Microsoft is obligated to "service" you by keep all the illegal copies of Windows updated, why shouldn't it also be obligated to give free upgrade to those customers who aren't willing to? That would "service" you, too
I still blame Microsoft. (Score:3, Interesting)
Now look at Ubuntu.
By default, you are a less privileged user. You have to do RESEARCH on how to log in as the root account. And the people who are most likely to be a problem are the least likely to do the research. This limits the trojan and virus threat.
By default, there are no open ports. This limits the worm threat
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Vista is pretty close if setup correctly.
When Vista first boots, it asks you to create a user account (and optionally password). What it's not clear about, is that this first account is actually the admin account. If you put a password on the admin account and create a regular user account and login with the regular user account, every UAC prompt will require the admin password before continuing. The admin account name/icon will already be selected/shown in the uac prompt and all you have to do is start
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Zombies can be tricky (Score:2, Interesting)
And... (Score:2, Insightful)
What about Bangkok? (Score:5, Funny)
I have the solution. (Score:2, Funny)
Oh wait...
Turk in Turkey? (Score:5, Informative)
As a Turkish guy I would like to state that we don't have any city/town/place called Turk in Turkey. But we have around 65 million Turks living in Turkey. I am really sorry that we don't have a place like the author said but I'll contact the authorities immediately to build a new city named Turk and place all spammers/virus writer in there so you don't have to change your post. We're benevolent people.
Re:Useless Geo Location (Score:2)
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What a load of crap. So how reliable is the "China == virus capital of the universe" conclusion all the xenophobes are hyperventilating about here? Perhaps Beijing is the sweet
What about the great firewall of china? (Score:2)
Censorship != Propaganda (Score:3, Insightful)
You mean censorship? Propaganda is what you read on sites like Slashdot. Both are bad, but they are not to be confused with each other.
Bag it, and get on with it! (Score:2)
As a friend of mine always said, bag [durex.com] it and get on with it.
The Great Firewall of China (Score:3, Interesting)
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Conclusion: ... G Bush is 100% responsible for failing to stamp out spam.
You just aren't in on the President's brilliant spam-fighting strategy. Once the dollar devalues even more and the economy collapses under the weight of crushing debt, the average American will be too poor to be able to afford C1AL15, even at a discount. At that point, the spammers will stop targeting Americans, and send all of the spam to Europe instead, and Presto! America's spam problem is solved.
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Notwithstanding the above, ALL credit cards, everywhere, are run by American companies. Bush could stop the whole lot in HOURS.
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Ahh...another clueless European that doesn't know jack about American government. Do yourself a favor and read about the Legislative, Judicial, and Executive Branches. You'll quickly find out that the president doesn't have the kind of power you THINK he has.
But as long as we're bashing Bush, who cares right?
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The creid card companies mantain a tight reign on what there licencees can buy and sell. If you fall out of line, your access is cut off io hours. New sites may pop up daily, but its not that easy to get a merchant account. You have to provide an insane amount of documentation - typically directors of the company to have to hand over passports, marriage licences, firstborn sons, etc. If evidence of promotion via spam was grounds for cancelling merchant accounts, and the
HTML vs. Text email (Score:2)
True.
"The idea is to train the filters so that the relative weight of whether the message looks like gibberish or not is high compared to other factors. Then you make the spam messages you want to actually reach the recipient look like legitimate messages."
Ah, no. The idea is to get past the spam filter with gibberish text but hawk the spamvertized item in a GIF or JPEG that the filter cannot see, but a human can (at least when reading e
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It seems powerpoint and word are both designed to just blindly execute whatever is embedded in their document formats. Talk about a ridiculous strategy. Why have a program execute documents in the first place?
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