‘National Zombie Awareness Week’ Launched in Australia

Australia recently hosted the "National zombie Awareness Week" from March 2, 2009 to March 8, 2009. The campaign was launched to educate and stimulate private and company Internet users on keeping themselves guarded against computer infections. The campaign ran under the direction of 'The Australasian Consumer Fraud Taskforce.'

The awareness campaign, which is featured on the website of the Australian Internet Industry Association, states that it is intolerable to have a bot-infected computer that is further converted into a compromised zombie. This is because such a computer results in massive spamming and attacks on innocent users' computers.

Additionally, the awareness spreading week was felt necessary following the recent proliferation of the Conficker virus that affected huge 10 Million systems worldwide, according to certain estimates from security researchers. Moreover, in spite of cleaning up some systems infected by the virus, more than 3 Million zombie systems still exist that could be made part of botnets for spreading malware or spamming junk e-mails, said researchers,.

Furthermore, the researchers sate that one in every 6 computers in Australia has already been included in a zombie botnet. According to Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a global organization, the total number of computers being converted into bots is rising at rapid pace throughout the world. All these reasons together culminated into the launch of the Awareness Campaign in Australia.

Meanwhile, with the campaign's launch, Graham Cluley, Senior Security Researcher at Sophos elucidated on the campaign via a note on his blog. He writes that as increasingly aggressive spammers collaborating with virus authors to build massive volumes of zombie PCs, one source of junk/spam mails is legitimate organizations whose computers have been hijacked, as reported by Sophos on March 3, 2009. Cluley added that the compromise of the legitimate organizations' computers not only damages their reputation, but it also allows others to block their e-mail.

Finally, the specialists state the campaign represents an encouraging step on the part of security companies to aid in the removal of various security inconsistencies.

Related article: “Loopholes did not cause online banking thefts”: ICBC

» SPAMfighter News - 3/19/2009