The March of the Botnets
By
Bob Brewin
Dennis Blair, Director of National Intelligence, provided a <a href=http://www.dni.gov/testimonies/20090225_testimony.pdf>grim statistic in his testimony</a> on Wednesday at a hearing of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He said 15 percent of all networked computers in the world are in <a href= http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet>botnets</a>, computers hijacked and remotely controlled to deliver spam or launch distributed denial-of-service attacks.
Dennis Blair, Director of National Intelligence, provided a grim statistic in his testimony on Wednesday at a hearing of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He said 15 percent of all networked computers in the world are in botnets, computers hijacked and remotely controlled to deliver spam or launch distributed denial-of-service attacks.
Statistics from research outfits such as IDC and Gartner indicate that there are about 1 billion personal computers in the world, but they don't provide any data on how many are connected to the Internet. But, I would hazard a guess that most are connected to the 'net, meaning that there's an army of slightly south of 150 million computers dedicated to spewing out spam.
No wonder I get so many e-mails from Nigrerians offering multimillion-dollar deals of a lifetime.
Blair, in his annual threat assessment to the panel, said that spam -- unsolicited e-mail that can contain malicious software -- now accounts for 81 percent of all the e-mail in the world. The folks at About.com estimate that 210 billion e-mails are sent every day. Using the 81 percent figure, that means about 170 billion messages are spam.
I wonder if Blair's spam estimate includes all the photographers who send e-mails to EVERYONE on the Nextgov and Govexec staffs every day.