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Beware the Botnets

By Joab Jackson and William Jackson, GCN Staff

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Bots, or compromised computers under the remote control of a hacker, have been around for years. But botnets—networks of compromised machines under the control of a single evil overlord—have grown into a significant problem over the past year, as hacking has moved from a vanity hobby to profit-driven organized crime.

Targeted computers typically are infected en masse by self-replicating worms that exploit unpatched vulnerabilities. Once infected, the new bot is directed to contact a server and download malicious code that puts it at the disposal of a controller.

If this is done quietly, a single controller can amass an army of thousands of compromised machines, which can be rented out to the highest bidder for purposes such as extortion through denial-of-service attacks, phishing, distributing spam, hosting malicious or contraband software, and infecting more bots. In addition to malicious activities, botnets also can consume network resources.

Spikes in the number of suspected bot clients were seen in June and have continued to increase through the end of the year. Not coincidentally, spam has been a persistent problem despite the growing use of filters to block it.

Network intrusion prevention systems, from companies such as Cisco Systems Inc., Juniper Networks Inc. and McAfee Inc., are getting better at identifying and blocking this traffic.

False positives, which can wrongly block legitimate traffic, have been the bane of intrusion prevention, but maturing technology has made the tools more effective. Unfortunately, huge botnets can be assembled, used, disposed of and replaced quickly, so that the fight continues unabated.
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