Many Windows PCs turned into zombies
I have said on many occasions that infected PCs belonging to uninformed or clueless owners were one of the biggest problems on the Internet. However, it is even worse than I thought if you believe a recent Microsoft report. They have compiled statistics from their malicious software removal tool that they run every month when you update. ZDNet gives some details.
Over the 15-month period covered by the report, the tool found that 5.7 million of unique Windows systems were infected. It removed 16 million instances of malicious software from these systems, Microsoft said.
Backdoor Trojans are the most prevalent threat, followed by e-mail worms, which were found on and removed from just over 1 million PCs, Microsoft said. Rootkits, which make system changes to hide another piece of possibly malicious software, are less widespread, with removals from 780,000 PCs.
Note that the infected machines can be harmful to everybody on the Internet, not just the local owner. They flood the Internet with worm-containing emails and Trojan horse activities.
A computer compromised by such a Trojan horse, popularly referred to as a zombie PC, can be used by miscreants in a network of bots, or “botnet”, to relay spam and launch cyberattacks.
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