Digital Prank

McAfee released its first quarter threat report last week on 5th of may has found that cyber criminals had taken control of almost 12 million new IP Addresses since last January which is a 50% increase since 2008. The report also revealed that United States is now the home to the largest percentage of botnet-infected computers, hosting 18% followed by China at the second position with 13%  and Australia at the third with 6% of all zombie machines.

Cyber criminals use botnets to send spam from zombie computers and the report says cyber criminals are building an army of infected, “zombie” computers to recover from last November’s takedown of a central spam-hosting ISP. The report also reveals some key findings which includes,

• The Koobface virus has made a resurgence, and more than 800 new variants of the virus were discovered in March alone
• Servers hosting legitimate content have increased in popularity with malware writers to distribute malicious and illegal content
• Cybercriminals are increasing their use of URL redirects and Web 2.0 sites to disguise their location
• Compared to the overall landscape, the Conficker worm represents a small subset of all threat reports. Autorun malware, a vector used by certain Conficker variants, represented only 10% of all detections reported during the first quarter.

You can download the complete MacAfee threat report from here.