[chadfree] The State of the Computing Industry

The State of the Computing Industry 
From; Windows Secrets Newsletter 
(formerly Woody's Windows Watch and Brian's Buzz on Windows)
http://windowssecrets.com/040923/
By Brian Livingston

I like to think back on the good old days, when the worst thing Windows
might do to us was crash.

Now we have to defend ourselves against invisible programs that silently
take over our PCs, record our keystrokes to capture our banking passwords,
use our bandwidth to send out junk e-mails that can't be traced back to the
senders, and then bury us in the spam we receive in turn from all the other
PC users whose machines have been similarly hacked.

This week, Symantec, the antivirus and security company, released its sixth
semiannual Internet Security Threat Report. It says the firm found a vast
increase in the number of "bot networks" that are under the control of
hackers. Each network consists of thousands of machines that have been
infected with Trojan horses and are now controlled by criminals.

During the first six months of 2004, Symantec detected a rapid growth of bot
networks from fewer then 2,000 to 30,000. The number of PCs in each network
is said to average around 2,000. Multiply the number of networks by the
average population of controlled machines and it works out to 60 million
"zombie" PCs =97 that we know about.

Symantec found one bot network consisting of 400,000 zombies, according to
an article by John Markoff in the New York Times. Each network can be used
to broadcast spam, launch devastating denial-of-service attacks against Web
sites the hackers don't like, and more.

What's going on here?

Is this it? Are we just going to face more and more attacks as our computer
resources spiral more and more out of our control?

It seems to me that the computing industry is in denial of how bad the
attacks on our PCs and our lives have become. Things aren't going to get
better without radical changes to bring about a safe and sane computing
environment. The first step is for us to stand back and survey just how bad
the situation has become.

What follows, therefore, is my first State of the Computing Industry report
=97 a quick and dirty overview of the maddening crisis that has engulfed us.

I focus in this report on four areas =97 viruses, spam, phishing, and adware
=97 although an entire book could be written on all the problems that
"making computers easier and more fun" has brought down on our heads. Here
we go; I hope you're sitting down.
++ There is more on the web site.

Mike ~ one of the Moderators
It is a good day if I learned something new.
Editor MikesWhatsNews http://www.mwn.ca/ 



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