The latest global research from Prolexic highlights how Internet "zombie" attacks (DDoS, SPAM etc.) are most likely to come from the computers used by customers of major ISP's, such as AOL and Wanadoo.

A "zombie" computer is one that has been infected by an online virus or Trojan and is then hijacked and used for massive SPAM (junk e-mail) or Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against other servers (websites etc.).

Having said that, it's hardly surprising that some of the world’s largest providers also have the greatest number of "zombie" infected PC's attached to them.

Interestingly AOL does provide security measures and some degree of online education about these dangers, thus the weakness is often on a consumers own computer system, an area that ISP's can not govern. This goes to show just how difficult solving the problem really is.

Though U.S.-based computers were responsible for the largest portion of DDoS traffic at 18%, countries like Hong Kong, Germany, Malaysia and the United Kingdom had higher percentages of infected computers. Prolexic based its report on attacks it saw over the last six months.