Available on the CipherTrust Web site, the ZombieMeter tracks the number of new 'zombies' per hour and is designed to help identify Internet security threats, the company said in a statement.
A zombie, in this context, is a computer -- typically connected to the Internet via a broadband connection, and connected to other such machines as part of a botnet -- that has been infected by a worm or virus and is used remotely to launch DoS attacks and send spam and phishing e-mails.
So far this month, CipherTrust has found an average of 172,009 new zombies each day. About 26 percent of those were found in the European Union, 20 percent in the United States and 15 percent in China, the company said.
Zombie networks have become a serious problem that requires more industry action, the US Federal Trade Commission said earlier this week. The organisation launched "Operation Spam Zombie" and plans to ask Internet service providers to quarantine zombies and to help users clean the PCs.
CipherTrust identifies threats such as zombie activity, virus patterns and phishing attacks using data from its IronMail appliance installed at customer sites, Paul Judge, CipherTrust chief technology officer, said in the statement.
Why is it that when in speaking about "Zombie PC's" that the mention of WHAT operating system(s) are running on those same said PC's is rarely, if ever, mentioned. It's purely a Microsoft issue and it's something that Microsoft has been faced with for years and STILL hasn't done anything to patch or fix their products to keep them from BECOMING "Zombies" in the first place. Every month people that are running MS Windows XP machines are faced with hundreds of megabytes of "patches" that need to be downloaded to "fix" or "patch" their machines. We're not talking just mere thousands of people, but countless millions. And you would tend to think that with between 500mb and 1gb or more of downloaded patches per person that the issue would be resolved...but it isn't - and it would appear that it will NEVER get fixed properly. Zombie PC's are a byproduct of a poorly constructed OS and a very poorly maintained OS by a monopolistic company that could care less about security in favour of profit and marketshare. Microsoft cares about the end user about as much as any of us cares about stepping on an ant during our daily slog to work. It will never change, and Microsoft will never change - irregardless of their marketing hype, their "Get the facts" campaign and their "Secure Computing Initiative".