Two scary stats from a recent Commtouch and PandaLabs study: between April and June, 74 per cent of all e-mail received worldwide was spam, and much of this was sent by an army of zombie computers numbering more than 10 million.
Zombies, or bots, are computers that are forced to do a hacker’s bidding through the use of small programs that secretly infect the systems. In Q2 2008, Turkey became the country with the most zombies at 11 per cent of the global total, followed by Brazil at 8.4 per cent and Russia with 7.4 per cent.