ISPs A Must For Defense Against Botnets And Spam: OECD

According to OECD, which recently released a report, ISPs act as vital controllers over botnets and spam.

The report, which was prepared on the basis of a worldwide database that consisted of 109bn spam mails released through 170m distinct Internet Protocols that were delivered in 2005-2009, discovered that from amongst the innumerable ISPs, 200 ISPs, which together maintained almost 90% of the entire share in the OECD market, were behind over 60% of the total contaminated systems globally.

The remaining service providers like corporate networks, university networks, providers of application services, and hosting providers were associated with lesser numbers of bots.

Stated the researchers that if the total fifty ISPs they spotted enhanced their efforts, it might be that the problem would shift somewhere else. But, it was far harder for shifting millions of contaminated systems joined in a network compared to shifting their C&C servers, alternatively ancillary services of other kinds, they added. ITnews published this on November 15, 2010.

Meanwhile, a few prominent ISPs were already disinfecting computers off malware. Recently after Australia introduced a scheme of voluntary software against zombies for ISPs, it was projected as one fine program for attaining comparatively fewer numbers of infections. Another vital factor was general awareness.

While security continues to be a nearly-impossible distinguisher within the ISP market that's sensitive to price, a few of the bigger providers have lately embraced anti-zombie codes.

Furthermore, according to the researchers, in Finland and Japan where ISPs and governments teamed up, the numbers of infections were the lowest.

Also, security measures, which directly deal with end-users for information campaigns and raising awareness, have proven useful; however, they aren't enough towards mitigating the general crisis. The reason isn't that end-users are impossible to correct. In fact, according to some surveys, they do correct themselves by embracing additional security practices like utilizing a firewall, anti-virus software along with automatic systems that update their software. But, since end-users aren't always at the same pace of security as the pace of threats' advances, their protection from malware infections remains inadequate.

Hence, such players' efforts too are essential to properly tackle botnets.

Related article: ISPs Could Play Key Role in Beating Spam

» SPAMfighter News - 11/23/2010