StopBadware.org co-founder Jonathan Zittrain was interviewed by CBS News’s Lesley Stahl for a 60 Minutes piece on malware that aired yesterday. Unfortunately, his segments got cut from the version that aired on TV, but you can find the videos (along with links to BadwareBusters.org and other helpful resources) on the segment’s web page.

StopBadware.org and Consumer Reports WebWatch are pleased to announce the full public launch of BadwareBusters.org, an online community for people looking for help removing viruses, spyware, and other malicious software from their computers.

Many people have already been helped by BadwareBusters since its beta rollout in November. Thanks to input from members of the community, we have enhanced the site quite a bit in the last few months.

BadwareBusters will be an important platform for the further development of StopBadware’s strategy to bring together people, organizations, and data in new ways to fight back against badware. The site already offers a pretty neat user reputation and message rating system, but we plan to build on this to provide tools that allow the community to express its collective voice. We want to learn from our users, so that StopBadware’s research and advocacy activities can be as effective and current as possible.

In addition to helping users with badware problems on their computers, the BadwareBusters community has helped webmasters of sites that have been hacked to distribute badware. Two of our volunteers who have worked with those webmasters shared their thoughts on participating in BadwareBusters:

From Anirban Banerjee, "Badwarebusters.org is a great resource for webmasters, both experienced and relatively new. This forum provides volunteers to help pin point issues which vex infected sites and thus has a major social impact by reducing the spread of malware."

Volunteer Denis Sinegubko said, "As an independent security tool developer, I get an invaluable chance to test my tool against the most current real problems of real websites, to communicate with owners of compromised sites and learn what’s really important to them. This helps me improve my tool and provides incentive to answer people’s questions and help them solve their problems. This sort of mutual benefits makes BadwareBusters.org a live community."

For more about today’s launch, see our press release. You can also check out the video below, which demonstrates the key features of the site:

The Anti-Spyware Coalition, of which StopBadware.org is a member, will host its 5th public workshop on May 19 in Washington, DC. The workshop will be focused around creating a chain of trust online, and how good actors can cooperate in order to protect users. I will be facilitating one of the panels, focused on the question "Who owns the problem?"

The agenda and registration for this event are now online at http://antispywarecoalition.org/events/may2009.php. Press, government, educational and nonprofit attendees register for free.

Over at social shopping site StyleFeeder, Philip Jacob posted some stats about the geographic origins of spammy accounts. It turns out that the majority of the spam accounts created on StyleFeeder come from IP addresses in India.

This reminded me that we hadn’t posted a breakdown of badware websites by country in quite some time. So, without further ado, here’s the updated pie chart:

Probably the most remarkable thing about the update is how similar it is to the one we included in our report last summer (PDF). China’s share has come down just a bit, from 52% to 48% of the world’s share of badware sites, but otherwise the top countries are holding pretty steady. It will be interesting to watch over time to see if China’s adjustment is the start of a trend or just a statistical blip.

It’s interesting to note that, while StyleFeeder’s spam seems to come from client PCs in India, there are relatively few badware-delivering websites in that country. This could be a reflection of security-savvy web hosting providers in India or perhaps a relatively low rate of new sites being created by individuals and small businesses in that country.

Also interesting is the commentary that follows Mr. Jacob’s stats, in which he muses on the challenge of how to address the spam problem effectively without overblocking. I encourage you to read his entire post.