Between 5 to 10 percent of all broadband subscribers in the Netherlands had their computers recruited into a botnet in 2009. For 2010, the numbers are likely to be higher. These infection rates are similar in most other Western countries, we report in a study that was released yesterday.
Commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, my colleagues Hadi Asghari, Johannes Bauer and Shirin Tabatabaie and I have prepared a fact-finding study entitled ‘Internet service providers and botnet mitigation’. The ministry has now publicly released the English and anonymized version of the report. It can be downloaded here. The confidential findings of our study were only shared with the ministry and the Dutch ISPs that are collaborating in a covenant to fight botnets.
The report also contains rankings of the infection rates of ISPs in 40 countries. Somewhere in the next few days, we’ll write a more detailed blog post about the findings.

1 thought on “Dutch Study: Between 5-10 percent of all broadband users were part of a botnet

  1. It would be good if users could get the information they need to know for themselves if their computer has been taken over as part of a botnet. Not all users, of course, would be able to use this information, but certainly many would.
    There must be some straightforward way to know if our computers are dialing out without us knowing it. If we already have the monitoring tools, it would be useful to provide a link to a website that explains how to use them.
    Some people like to know more about how their computers work, and that would be good for this concern.

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