[Infowarrior] - FW: [ISN] Beware of Zombies ??

[Richard Forno]

Anyone care to tell me how Strassman can say with such "engineering
precision" that there were "exactly" 735,598 zombified computers in the US
on a given day, and that ALL those systems were zombified exclusively by
Chinese activity? 

Unless there is 100% confirmation that the software used by this
zombification was of Chinese origin and under Chinese operational control,
how would these statistics be changed if it was determined that there were
zombified systems created by Russia that use the same zombie software as the
purported Chinese-controlled ones? And how does Strassman's statistic deal
with man-in-the-middle controllers that may be in another country besides
China?

Sure, DOD (and USG) has it's bad cyber-days, but given their penchant for
hyping meaningless statistics on cyberspace activitiy over the years I have
a hard time believing Strassman's "precision" here.....

-rf


Attack of the Chinese Zombies
By Bob Brewin
GovExec.com
September 17, 2007

The wave of cyberprobes or cyberattacks against Pentagon networks and
government computer systems in France, Germany, New Zealand and the
United Kingdom this summer appears to emanate from China, but no one in
authority in the Defense Department or any of the other countries that
have been victimized seems willing to finger the Chinese government or
military as the culprit.

Paul Strassmann -- who served as director of Defense information in the
early 1990s, the acting chief information officer of NASA from 2002 to
2003, and now serves as a Defense senior adviser -- declines to point
fingers, either. He prefers, instead, to focus on one startling fact
about Chinese activity in cyberspace: As of the morning of Sept. 14,
there were exactly (remember, Strassmann is an engineer and likes
precision) 735,598 computers in the United States infested by Chinese
zombies, he said. Zombies are those small programs that infect computers
at the root level and allow the computers to be controlled by remote
Users.

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http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?articleid=38027