Worldwide Network of Zombie Computers

International. In Latin America, Brazil and Argentina are the largest generators of infected programs and illegal online operations. One in five computers in Argentina is a victim of crackers who use it to send spam, phishing emails or denial-of-service attacks; these computers are part of a network of machines that have been infected with the same bot, allowing the criminal to have control over them remotely and perform illegal actions through them.

Computer insecurity in Latin America has reached such a point that the report presented by Symantec states that 22 percent of the zombie computers in the region are located in Argentina and the city of Buenos Aires is the one that has the largest number of orders infected with bots. Likewise, this nation spreads 14 percent of spam throughout the region and ranks as the fourth country with malicious activity in the world, which happens due to insufficient development and the disinterest of users in security.

According to data from the Argentine virtual newspaper San Jorge, 711,912 new threats were detected last year compared to 125,243 threats in 2006, an increase of 468% corresponding to a total of 1,122,311 malicious code threats detected at the end of 2007.

It should be noted that while Argentina has fewer Internet users than Brazil, and has a lower development than Mexico, it owns 17 percent of malicious activity, Brazil has 40 percent and Peru 13 percent. Similarly, Buenos Aires has 22% of the computers involved in zombie networks, security by Lima, Santiago de Chile and Bogotá.

Colombia is another of the Latin countries affected by hacker attacks. According to data presented by Symantec and the Banking Association of Colombia (Asobancaria), 1,494 million Internet banking operations were carried out in the country, of which 1,780 were fraudulent, positioning the country as the sixth in the continent with the largest number of zombie computers.

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Worldwide in 2005, Spain was one of the nations most affected by infection and remote control of its computers, having more than 150,000 computers infected per month, mainly residential computers. However, the information was not generated in these networks, but was produced in the United States and China and was distributed through this network of zombies.

Three years ago, the United States, China and South Korea occupied the top three places of spamming countries and Spain ranked fifth in the world, followed by France.

In January 2008, Panda Laboratories detected that there are approximately half a million zombie computers worldwide, many of which are European, due to the high broadband speeds and good computer equipment that is available there. Likewise, countries with good IT infrastructures top the list of infected computers such as Germany and Italy with 20 percent of these.