Photo courtesy of Scott Beale / Laughing Squid
It seems (or at least, it's being claimed) that Roy's "Boycott Novell" site is being "attacked" again. He says he's suffering from a denial-of-service attack that's been going on for several weeks now (although the indication on Alexa of this are, at best, equivocal, and I've had no trouble in accessing the site myself over the last month), and pins it on the Windows-running "zombie PCs". Schestowitz then reiterates the claim that "up to about one in two Windows PCs is a zombie", a claim he's made several times before, as we're about to see.
This offers an interesting opportunity to examine Schestowitz's journalistic (for lack of a better term) approach. I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask readers to put their critical thinking caps on here and try to follow along.
The story to which the claim links is from, guess where? "Boycott Novell!", published about two weeks ago. Here the claim is amplifed: "In 2008 a security firm showed that almost half of all PCs (Windows) are zombies" (emphasis added), linking to yet another article. "Showed". Keep that word in mind.
The "evidence" which "shows" this is not in the article from May, again on "Boycott Novell!", to which the preceding article links. Titled "A World in Which Almost One of Two PCs is a Zombie", the claim is now a quote from an article in The Inquirer from last March, which attributes to USA Today the statement that "on an average day, 40 per cent of the 800 million computers connected to the Internet are bots used to send out spam, viruses and to mine for sensitive personal data." (Emphasis added.)
40 per cent of 800 million is 320 million, by the way. Keep that in mind, too.
Arriving at the USA Today article, here's what we learn:
On a typical day, 40% of the 800 million computers connected to the Internet are bots engaged in distributing e-mail spam, stealing sensitive data typed at banking and shopping websites, bombarding websites as part of extortionist denial-of-service attacks, and spreading fresh infections, says Rick Wesson, CEO of Support Intelligence, a San Francisco-based company that tracks and sells threat data. (Emphasis added.)
The article doesn't offer any pointers, but Mr. Wesson's company isn't hard to find. As reported, it "tracks and sells threat data" and also markets (at a reasonably significant price, I'd imagine) a service called "REACT", which allows corporate networks to better deal with botnet-generated spam.
Interestingly, there isn't any reiteration of this claim on the company's web site, nor any substantiation for it. They stopped updating their corporate blog two or three years ago, so there's nothing there. There's a saying about never asking the barber whether you need a haircut or not. You probably want to be cautious in asking the anti-botnet solution vendor how many botnets there are.
Is it out of line to imagine that this figure might be just a bit exaggerated?
Back at USA Today, it's interesting in this regard to examine the graphic in the article, which shows "the average daily number of botnet communiqués to accept instructions from a controller, deliver spam, conduct phishing campaigns, click on ads to earn revenue, carry out denial-of-service attacks, steal data, scan for vulnerable computers, and spread infections." (Emphasis added. What a lot of stuff to do! Busy, busy botnets!)
Now, look at the number of such "communiqués" in January of 2009: 7,303,148.
That means that all of those "zombies", 320 million of them on any given "typical" day, are individually sending out a whopping total of less than a quarter of a percent, .0023 to be precise, of a "communiqué" on that particular day.
Yet Schestowitz claims that this incidence of PCs being "zombified", "up to about one in two Windows PCs"—and I have to admit that, technically speaking, a quarter of a percent is "up to about one in two", but at a pretty good remove—has been "shown". I'm still left wondering where, exactly.
Something's out of whack here. Four out of ten of the almost-a-billion PCs on the planet is a zombie "on a typical day", yet they collectively send out well under 8 million "communiqués" on that "typical day"? Unreasonable. USA Today is a rag for reporting such inanely conflicting figures, and Roy's an utter hack for making farcical claims based on evidence this specious.
Some "journalist". Some "truth".
