I know, the actual topic sounds strange to you and you might want to look at your schedule first – but I can assure you, the 1st of april is already over and this is not an april fool. But have you ever thought about malware and the health of the environment?

Believe it or not – there are people worrying about that, as Avert-Labs are blogging, on their site. Let’s take a closer look at power consumption:

The more a PC’s got to do, the more traffic a router has got to handle, the more power will be needed. According to the Oxford Environmental Change Institute, the average PC eats about 76W. As load raises, so does power consumption – up to 114W.

Now let’s look at the number of hosts in a botnet or other mass infections and multiply their number by 30W and you’ll get a huge number which could represent a household being run for 8 years as you sum it up…

Does that mean I am helping the environment by trying to track down new malware and killing botnets?