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A Geography Lesson In Internet Bad Stuff
from the hotspots... dept
Future Now is looking at some pretty funky maps that claim to show the origins of spam, viruses and directory harvest attacks, all courtesy of Postini, who's in the business of trying to stop all this stuff. Still, it is interesting to look at the various "hotspots" for where all this bad internet activity originates, and wonder why it seems to be so localized, and whether or not the geographic clustering could suggest ways to minimize the problems associated with these types of attacks. Future Now also wonders if there are unintended consequences, such as whether or not spam friendly locations eventually build stronger technology communities.
Reader Comments
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I have a theory
I have a theory on at least SOME of the hotspots.
They could be localized due to some incompetent and/or negligent broadband ISPs and their customers (ie: zombies).
Take for example, Montreal and their broadband network videotron. The last two years, they've marketted broadband and pushed it to every tom, dick and harry out there. Originally it was pretty good. Once code red hit, the network went DOWN HARD. Since then I've monitored the traffic and the hits I get from PCs infected inside the videotron network is outrageous (my log file, which doesn't log all hits, grows to 15 megs daily). Believe it or not, I still get code red hits in high numbers. Videotron is unwilling, or unable to stop this. The most they've done publicly is declare that they've blocked port 80.
Since code red and nimda, my incoming led on the modem has been a constant red.
I'm sure my ISP isn't alone in this...dumb broadband users are ripe for the picking and its easier when an ISP isn't secured itself.
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You mean...
Who's not whose
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Mapping IP to Geo location?
I wonder how they generated this map (associate IP addresses with lattitude/longitude geographical locations).
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No Subject Given
I wonder why no viruses come from Europe or Russia? Then there is that virus hotspot of Newfoundland. There seem to be differences between the map and the data download - there are viruses from Europe in the data download.
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Re: No Subject Given
It's probably not that there are no instances of viruses being sent, rather in the relative scale those areas don't make the cut.
And always remember, there are Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics.
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