Viruses/Worms News

Threat report: 12 million new zombies in first quarter

Thursday, May 7, 2009

The quarterly threat report from network security firm McAfee released this week had good news and bad news for the battle against spam.

On the positive side, McAfee reported that spam levels still have not reached the peak attained before the shutdown of the McColo server in November 2008. Spam volumes are still 30 percent below the peak level of the 3rd quarter of 2008.

Zombie computers, which are controlled remotely by spam networks called botnets, grew by about 12 million PCs in the first quarter - that's the bad news.

This is a 50 percent increase over the levels from the last quarter of 2008, McAfee said. The 12 million zombies new exceed the previous record by 1 million.

"The activity level of new zombies indicates that the spammers are working hard to regain the infrastructure lost and that volumes will return to previous levels sometime soon," the report said.

The much-discussed Conficker worm did not live up to its hype, but McAfee said Conficker is still a threat, if diminished.

AutoRun-based malware, which uses USB drives or flash memory to spread to new PCs, was seen in far greater numbers than Conficker this quarter, the report said.