McAfee Antivirus agency recently released a fresh statistic which shows that, USA is the country with the highest count of computers used to build botnets, worldwide.
Computers known as botnet servers refer to remote systems, which issue commands to other PCs in the state of compromise by cyber-criminals, as well as receive huge information in return from those compromised computers.
The number of botnet servers estimated mayn't be exact since many-a-time the botnet servers' owners attempt at disguising their location through the utilization of different tactics especially proxies. Nevertheless, according to McAfee's data, the U.S. houses 631 botnet command-and-control servers that's over 250% more than that in Britain. Meanwhile, by occupying the No.2 position among the countries with the maximum botnet servers, Britain is home to 237 such servers. Following this nation-state are Holland (154), Russia (125), Germany (95) and Korea (81). Apparently, in the USA, the servers can be found chiefly in Washington D.C., California and Los Angeles.
Also, considering the list of ten countries with the maximum servers, Canada managed to be the best having merely 38, while more countries managing likewise consist of Switzerland, Australia and China with 77, 63 and 48 servers respectively.
Simultaneously, presuming that McAfee's list isn't wholly exact due to the masking of the C&C servers' locations, still irrespective of the positions they occupy, bot-networks are a highly dangerous security threat online given that they're capable of potentially damaging many million PCs.
Moreover according to McAfee, authorities enforcing legal acts have tried their best to bring an increasing number of botnet creators to justice. During 2012, a particular hacker was arrested and punished for compromising 72,000 PCs and converting them into zombies. Then the notorious Bredolab network-of-bots' builder, during May 2012, was sentenced to 4 years in jail, while during December same year, Facebook assisted FBI in clamping on a gang, which amassed 11m contaminated PCs for a botnet.
However, the cyber-criminals constantly improve upon their attacks via releasing more-and-more malicious programs. In September 2012, McAfee reported that malicious programs increased so fast that was never seen before, during the last 4-yrs.
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