Thursday, June 19, 2008

Surfing in a hostile world !

To get a hostile view of the world we surf in, here are a few statistics about all the current day malware forms coexisting with us.

A few highlights (as of today)
  1. There are around 3000 botnet command and control servers active at any time in the day.
  2. There are around 100K bot machines (using a 30-day age value of each bot).
  3. US has around 4500 bot C&C's (the largest in the world ). Interesting to see that China is way down the list with only 115.
  4. There were around 3.5 Million unique malware binaries seen in October 2007 with the number of unique binaries being atleast 1 Million every month ever since.
  5. The 0-day detection stats for Antivirus vendors is very interesting. Out of the 68000 samples of new malware that were tested against wellknown vendors in the last 24 hours, the really well known ones like Kaspersky, McAfee etc. were able to detect only 70% of them while AntiVir detected around 98% of them. Curiosly, Symantec is not on the list.

These statistics are from ShadowServer. Shadowserver's statistics are generally considered very reliable in the security community.It is not clear to me as to what percentage of the address range they monitor but the stats are nevertheless very revealing.