Malaysia is ranked 5th as spam zombies

Malaysia is ranked 5th among 29 countries in Asia Pacific region as a spam distributor. Philippines is ranked top, followed by Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Laos. This is the result from a survey conducted by Symantec Corp, a security solution vendor.

Malaysia also ranked 7th as the propagator of zombie machines, behind China, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Thailand and Vietnam.


What is Spam?
The mass electronic distribution of unsolicited email to individual email accounts, email lists, Usenet groups advertising, promoting or performing any of the following actions:
a) The forwarding of email (chain letters)
b) The advertising or promotion of pornographic web sites
c) Advertising or promoting unsolicited web sites
d) The harassment of individuals or groups
e) The forgery of email headers of your email
f) The promotion of unsolicited business activities.
The survey also indicated that 96% of computers in Malaysia are zombie machine. These are PCs that have been compromised by hackers and used to launch spam e-mail, or phishing messages that lure computer users to mistakenly reveal personal information such as credit card details or bank account passwords.

An online banking account with a US$10,000 (RM35,000) balance is worth US$300 (RM1,100), for example. A verified PayPal account, meanwhile, would fetch between US$50 and US$500 (RM175 and RM1,750).

The causes for such high amount of zombie machines are the lack of awareness among the new broadband Internet users to safeguard their personal information and online identities plus the widespread use of pirated sofware which may contined trojans and other malicious code.

Solution:
Use the security solutions of the combination of antivirus, firewall and intrusion detection capabilities.


Source: TheStar InTech 10April 2007.