Is it really surprising?

Oct 9, 2007 15:15 GMT  ·  By

China has a very large population, the largest in the world, with more than 1.31 billion people! One huge country and a pretty well informatized one too. I guess that due to this huge number of inhabitants and the fact that a lot of them have PCs, computer virus infections spread real fast. All a malware writer has to do is launch a worm and boom! It infects hundreds of thousands of computers, maybe a million, like Fujacks did!

And as the AHN informs, more than a million Chinese computers have been infected by viruses in an outbreak related to the Iong National Day Holiday last week. That was predictable, in my opinion - whenever a large holiday pops up, spammers send a lot of messages trying to infect people. Out of the millions that receive the messages, some will get infected, and if you look at it, one million users with infected machines isn't even 0.1 percent of China's population; from this perspective, it doesn't seem too much.

As the same site informs, in a single day, 118.000 computers have crashed; again, a huge number, but a small percent of the total population - this is like less than 0.01%, so there is no need to worry. But what is a bit concerning is the fact that a lot of the malware writers out there and hackers are from China and that they seem to be impossible to take down. And just look at the news - a lot of countries have complained that their governments have been hit by Chinese hackers. So, the fact that they spread a lot of computer viruses really fast doesn't come as a surprise to me!

However, Chinese officials know of the cyber-security situation in the country. They've already deployed measures to fight off hackers and have also designed the Great Firewall of China. However, in my opinion, the population is way too big to properly control hackers and other malicious users?