July 9 2012 , was the day when FBI pulled down the curtains on Operation GhostClick. GhostClick was the name given to the operation which was targeted towards the DNSChanger Bot wherein FBI had seized the malicious servers and on 9th July they pulled the plug of these malicious servers.
A few statistics were released and that was the end of Operation GhostClick. While going through my archives I came across an interesting analysis.
The analysis is based on three factors
a: World Population
b: Internet Penetration
c: DNS Changer after shutdown statistics which were country-wise infection rates.
After months and months of spreading awareness and requesting users to clean up their infected system, however, even after the completion of this exercise, infected system still remained plugged on to Internet.
Even though the graph was created in the month of August 2012, it represents quite few startling facts. To being with , the XLS sheet has been uploaded to Google Docs and can be viewed / downloaded from over here.
Those who would want to re-vist DNS-Changer, may read about it here, here and here.
Fig: 1 DNS Changer Country-wise distribution
The above graph is based on DNS-Changer statistics which simply compares the countries and their percentage in the DNS-Changer botnet. From this graph , we can state that 8% of the DNS-Changer infected systems were from India or 19% of the entire DNS-Changer systems were from US.
However, does this portray the true picture? I do not think so, hence I went a few steps ahead , added the world-population and Internet penetration vis’a’vis the DNS-Changer. In order to get a clarity of the entire infection.
As a kid I was once explained the importance of percentages in business , according to him – if you sold 3 apples yesterday and today you are selling 9 apples then what is your business growth? So, stating that I attained a business growth of 300% is incorrect as the figures itself are negligible. Hence in order to arrive at the real-life figures we need to know the exact numbers too. However, if the sale figure is in Tonnes and KTonnes , then it would really make sense to apply percentages and the law of averages. His business logic made sense to me 25 years ago and even today it has the same profound effect on me. The rest of conversation is inconsequential for this blog-post.
Fig 2: DNS-Changer wrt World-Population and Internet Penetration
Fig. 3: DNS Changer wrt World Internet Users
Just by looking at Fig 2 graph, can we co-relate the present day events eg. #OccupyWallStreet or effect of Internet on the relationship between Governments / #SnowdenEffect – Yes you can , one can even chart out marketing strategies, pricing etc.
