France, Germany and USA Host Most C&C Servers for Botnets

Damballa the anti-botnet specialist recently conducted an analysis according to which, the majority of C&C (command-and-control) servers have their base in France, Germany and USA. Reveals statistics the security company gathered, the percentage of botnets run in USA, Germany and France are 23.9%, 17.9% and 8.6% respectively.

Remarking about these discoveries, Vice-President of Research Gunter Ollmann at Damballa stated that 50% of the C&C servers that Internet crooks utilized for regulating their botnets were based inside commercial hosting services in nation states that previously didn't have any connection with such crime. Theregister.co.uk published this on October 26, 2010. Ollmann added that hosting of a server was generally not related to the places the crooks were really located in as well as the kind of users attempted for compromise.

Moreover, while USA, Germany and France lead in hosting most botnet servers, Russia and China are known as havens for spamming, hacking as also other cyber-crimes although much down the ranking order in Damballa's list. Indeed, Russia at 4.2% and China at 3.5% rank No.5 and 6 respectively.

Furthermore, apart from countries, Damballa as well notes the ISPs that are most offending in these nations. According to its analysis, people accumulating bots prefer to utilize commercial hosting firms as well as seem to indicate the firms they specifically choose.

Says Damballa that ISPs, AT&T and Germany's 1&1 Internet AG have unknowingly gotten to be cyber-criminals' favorite control source. 1&1 Internet alone is behind over 1 in ten botnet C&C servers.

Remark the security researchers that the greatest online threat currently is from botnets which are capable of being extremely flexible and powerful regarding the illegitimate and malicious operations they execute. The massive numbers of contaminated PCs they accumulate are utilized for executing dangerous DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) assaults, dispatching innumerable spam mails daily, uploading malware onto targeted PCs within specific geographical areas, and carrying out more complicated assignments.

Thus Ollmann advises ISPs, particularly 1&1 Internet along with hosting companies that they adopt countermeasures that'll minimize bot-herders' preference for them. However, that this won't be at the cost of reducing general availability and connectivity is what's hoped.

Related article: France too Falls Prey to Chinese Hackers

» SPAMfighter News - 11/6/2010