ShadowServer Foundation - Botnet Activities Rise Worldwide

As per ShadowServer Foundation, a group sharing information about botnet activity, the amount of familiar botnets, which started to take off about half a dozen years ago, has risen from 1,500 two years ago to 3,500 at present.

Botnet also known as zombie army comprises several hacked systems that are used for creating and sending spam or viruses or overflow a network with messages as a denial of service attack.

The flourishing world of botnet attack asks for the IT attention, with the government websites of the US and South Korea were hit by distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks by a botnet. It is said that the botnet is managed by an unfamiliar attacker (North Korea is suspected), but the obscure world of botnet is still growing unabated.

There had been reports of denial-of-service attacks over the July 4th weekend; however the bulk of the attacks seemed to have started on July 6 and early on July 7. The ShadowServer Foundation demonstrated a sharp spike in denial-of-service attacks from familiar botnets, executing from baseline of less than 100 to more than 700 in a short period.

Experts claim that there is no method to stop future cyber attacks equivalent to the one that has been attacking several government websites in South Korea and the US. They are easy to execute and the method is easy - Assail the servers hosting a specific site with numerous requests for information so that the server becomes inundated and the site goes offline.

Although botnets come and go, more victorious ones sustain for years as large command-and-control systems executed by vague groups that have taken over several thousands of desktops and sometimes servers.

During 2008, a California based ISP - McColo Corporation - was thought to have been the home of several botnet command and control servers, which was afterward verified by security researchers. It is expected that at least 75% of the world spam derived from McColo Corporation's operations.

However, the closing of McColo did not lessen the threats to business from botnets, which showed the worldwide scale, sophistication and competence of botnet operations.

Related article: Switzerland Received The Highest Volume of Spam Mail in July 2008

» SPAMfighter News - 7/22/2009