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Study: Vast number of cyber attacks 'Made in the USA'

When it comes to cybercrime, Eastern Europe, China, and Brazil may get the lion's share of press attention, but a new study shows a vast proportion of attacks come from computers in the United States. Security firm SecureWorks has counted 20.6 million attacks against its customers that originated inside US borders so far this …

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Rich
Thumb Up

So they'll be on Fonterra's case

Hacking their servers and websites...

More work for the NZ IT industry fixing them up. Oh goody...

Rick
Paris Hilton

File under obvious

So the story states that the most attacks came from computers within the US well as the story also states most are controlled by hackers outside the US so all this shows is how lazy us Americans are in protecting ourselves. my question is why haven't the ISP's throttled those idiots? why should i get throttled because im downloading something when those douches can't even update their antivirus and basic system updates.

>/ Paris cause we all know shes been compromised!

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Blocking IP ranges

The vast majority of attacks originate outside the target country, but of course the hop before is often the same country. By broad blocking IPs it is made harder to compromise but of course not impossible.

It would be quite interesting to restrict the net to the country of installation by default, that would probably solve a lot of problems, but of course the barn door has been open for a while now and the horse has bolted a long long time ago.

There are not too many websites or net resources that I use outside of N.America and Western Europe, I would say about 99.99% of my net dealings are in that area. The UK is actually very limited in what it offers for tech, poor show by the Brits :)

I don't think we even have a Linux based distro that is housed out of the UK.

Tech is really met by the US and Canada, and commerce by the UK, if you are in the UK. If you are in the US I don't think you would notice if Europe was dropped. One thing is for sure though, it is very rare to actually need a resource from Asia, Africa, S.America, or Oceania, blocking there still makes sense to reduce overall attacks.

Eponymous Cowherd
Joke

The plural of "windows computer"...?

Botnet.

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Melamine...

...I know it's a bit of a tangent to the point of th article, but Melamine doesn't *actually* "boost the amount of protein [in the milk]", it falsely increases the reading for protein content.

Peter H. Coffin

Rick's got it.

It's the same arguement as "most spam comes from the US", and it's all based on tracking IP addresses. Well, what a surprise that the US has more poorly-managed and thus zombified computers than the rest of the world. There's more computers in the US, so it's not really surprising that there's more in the hands of incompetants.

Yes, I'm from the US. I *know* most of the computer-owners here are nitwits.

Steve
Boffin

Melamine

It doesn't boost the amount of protein - it boosts the amount of nitrogen. As the nitrogen usually comes from protein, it makes it look like there's more protein in the milk. So, even if it weren't giving babies kidney stones, they'd be dying from malnutrition.

If I was mixed up in this, I'd be looking for a quick exit from the country - these are the guys who executed their drug regulator for corruption. Maybe we should execute a few bank directors.

Drew Cullen
(Written by Reg staff)

Re: Melamine

Story updated with correct information - thanks for the catch.

Tom Willis
Linux

@AC 05:38

Ubuntu is housed in the UK. Quite a well-known distro, I'd have thought.

BioTube

Melamine

This has nothing to do with the story, but wasn't that what was in the poisoned dogfood?

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

@Tom Willis

quite right - I thought they were S. African but appear to be based on the Isle of Man in the City of Douglas.

Shame we don't have a cooler distro though, but hey I suppose we have one; off the main land on one of the islands, owned by a South African.

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Isle of Man

actually it is not part of the UK, it retains its own governance.

Oh well, number still at zero.

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