Trend Micro warn of Gov Botnets.

Trend Micro, a pretty big AV company have announced that thousands of government computers may be compromised with bot infections. Among those listed are the Department of Defense, the Navy Network Information Center, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, Argonne National Laboratory, and the Navy Regional Data Automation Center.

Their research comes from the analysis of 60Terabytes of data from their Behavioral Analysis Security Engine (BASE), including a massive amount of spam email in addition to aggregated data from network connections on netflow enabled networks and dns queries. Some of the organisations listed have disputed the finding and research team is now rechecking their findings.

Trend Micro estimates there are 70 million hacked zombie computers worldwide and that each month 8 to 9 million are used to send spam. Also 60% of the compromised computers are primarily used to send spam, the remainder for more nefarious purposes.

Sources: Trend Micro: Thousands Of Government Computers Infected By Bots and Trend Micro Goes After Botnets