ZombieMeter keeps tabs on hacked PCs

Internet security company CipherTrust on Thursday breathed life into its ZombieMeter, a new system that tracks traffic from compromised PCs around the world.

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 emails.

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.