Ever Wondered What A Botnet Infection Would Look Like If Mapped Like Flu Epidemic Maps?
We hear almost every day about some new botnet coming online or an old one resurfacing but it is really hard to understand just how big these infected computer networks are but thanks to the folks at F-Secure we now have a better idea.
What the team at F-Secure did was to take all the reports of ZeroAccess botnet infections from today and then plot them on images of the earth as seen from space. This is very similar to how organizations like the CDC and World Health Organization track, and predict, flu epidemic outbreaks around the world.
The interesting thing is that there is a lot in common with the two, a flu epidemic affects humans and is transmitted around the world by infected people as they move from one city to the next, one country to the next. Botnets on the other hand are just a computer version of that infection and while they strictly affect computer systems, mobile and other types, they spread outward as more and more computers become infected.
So imagine if each of those red triangles, used to represent where there is an infected computer that is a part of the botnet, represented an outbreak of the flu. As you can see from the images this one ZeroAccess botnet has spread like literal wildfire since it was first discovered on 2010, and it doesn’t look to be slowing down.
via VentureBeat
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Steven Hodson Steven has been around the tech world long enough to see most of the stuff we think of cool happen before which leads to a certain bit of cynicism that has contributed to him being known as the cranky old fart of the Internet. Besides sharing some of the goodness that he finds with you here at 42x you can also find him curating some digital goodness at Winextra (tech type stuff) and Rotten Gumdrops (for your daily dose of WTF).
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