The Numbers Are Just Bigger In China

According to the People's Daily (English version), at least one million PCs were infested with a computer virus during the country's recent National Day holiday.
This national holiday is called Golden Week and is a week long, and the Chinese have three of them, proving that even Chinese holidays are a step up the order of magnitude scale.

However, during this holiday, many of the fireworks happened inside the PCs of the populace.

"Viruses have been extremely active during the long vacation because more people chose to stay at home and surf the Internet, shopping online or playing online games," commented He Gongdao, an antivirus expert at Chinese antivirus company Jiangmin Co.

"More than 24,000 types of viruses were detected during the week," he said, noting that the new virus affected about 40,000 computers a day, and its monitors detected more than 118,000 computers crashing on October 6 alone.

According to the latest survey conducted by the Ministry of Public Security, China has encountered a rising Internet security problem over the past three years, mainly triggered by a growing number of profit-driven computer virus writers, hackers and illegal traders.

Some 65.7 percent of 15,000 companies polled had suffered Internet security problems from May last year to May this year.

The convergence of better, more widely deployed technology among the teeming masses (and growing middle classes) in China, Russia and elsewhere and the growing ability of hackers to control linked networks of hacked computers (called "botnets") for nefarious (and unfortunately quite profitable) purposes does not bode well for the IT security budget and infrastructure of anyone who might be a target -- either in China itself, or, due to the interconnectedness of the global network, anywhere on the surface of the globe. Which means everyone, you included.

And with examples of this type of hacking arrangement (such as the Storm Worm botnet) now able to outmuscle even the most powerful supercomputers, even the biggest IT security budget and sharpest IT team in the world isn't going to help much if you enter the hacker's digital crosshairs. But hey, look on the bright side -- if all of your computers go down at once, maybe you'll get three weeks of holiday too.