Industry News Home More stories like this... RSS Feed

Botnets quadruple in three months

The last four months have seen the number of botnets increase almost four times in a trend thought to be the result of children and teenagers spending more time on their computers over the summer holidays, reports Softpedia.

According to online security experts, the increasing number of infected zombie botnet computers might also be down to a recent increase in SQL injection attacks against web servers, which make them even more vulnerable.

"During the same time period, there isn't an appreciable increase in new malware, new viruses or anything that would obviously indicate why this is so, said John Bambenek of the SANS Internet Storm Centre.

"I imagine that the bad guys have gotten better [at] keeping machines owned, but there is one vector that we need to get much better about tracking and managing, and that's direct web-based malware."

According to Bogdan Botezatu of BitDefender, around eight in ten spam messages are believed to originate from zombie computers.

PC Tools Spyware Doctor removes and protects you from all forms of unwanted spyware. Visit www.pctools.com to upgrade your protection