Botnet Business both Enjoyable and Profitable

According to the news from EWeek.com dated August 4, 2010, a security investigator reveals how people owning botnets earn millions of dollars operating them, as also a widely-used campaign they're leveraging for staying obscure whilst churning profits.

During the end-week of July 2010, Vice-President of Research at Damballa, Gunter Ollmann in a talk at the Las Vegas (US)-held Black Hat security conference offered attendees a peek into the way of easily building botnets. He also told them how attackers could convert one infected network of only a few PCs into an operation worth a million.

Said Ollmann that similar to any business, an operation with a botnet first involves a business strategy. DarkReading published this on August 3, 2010. According to the investigator, many operators first target victims of a particular category alternatively databases they know are going to be valuable. Thereafter they gather certain impression of the expenses and earnings likely to emanate. If the computation is correct then the earnings can potentially be a huge $6m/year, Ollmann explained.

He then said that the most usual procedure involves botnet builders using malware toolkits for creating botnet malware like Poisonly, SpyEye and Zeus and ensure that the malicious programs get supported on freely available Web-services.

He also said that after the bot-master sets up the initial network, it's time for him to develop a trust and reputation so he can easily develop and trade services from the forthcoming bot networks.

Ollmann then elaborates that they're professional teams that run majority of botnets and that they also run several botnets simultaneously. A lot of the malicious networks contain around 2,000 PCs, while those running inside business ventures run some hundreds.

Moreover, it's also normally simple to supervise a botnet, particularly when the botnet constructor employs widely-used do-it-yourself toolkits for its creation. These supervisory modules arrive pre-packed with utilities for handling captured identity credentials, synchronizing as also sending commands to contaminated PCs, along with other abilities.

Meanwhile, as botnet operations grow in importance within the world of cyber-crime, the demand for botnet-operators' services also increases, making the business more attractive for fresh entrants, Ollmann concludes.

Related article: Botnet Misuses Google Analytics

» SPAMfighter News - 8/12/2010