Botnet also called as "zombie army," consists of a large number of compromised computers that are used to create and send spam or viruses or flood a network with messages as a denial of service attack.
When computers are corrupted by software designed to direct their actions, the infected computers are unable to resist the commands of the bot owner. It poses continued threats to businesses and is among the most harmful when successfully penetrating a business network or obtaining access to confidential data.
McColo disorder
In 2008, McColo Corporation, a California based ISP, was believed to be the home of many Botnet command and control servers, which was later confirmed by security researchers. It is estimated that about 75% of the world’s spam originated from McColo Corporation’s operations.
But, the closure of McColo did not diminish the risks to business from Botnets, which demonstrated the global scale, sophistication and efficiency of Botnet operations.
The evolution of Botnets and threats they represent for business requires an effective approach to the detection and protection against the harm they can inflict.
Phishing
In 2007, Botnets became the dominant technology used to distribute not only spam but also malware and phishing schemes. According to the recent data, Botnets were responsible for about 90 percent of all spam email in 2008. This year, they have morphed to P2P delivery method e.g., Nugache Botnet.
Botnet Sophistication
Botnet operators use sophisticated attack techniques like hypervisor technology, which allows multiple operating systems to share a single hardware host. Each OS controlled by malicious master, but appear to have the host’s processor and resources without his knowledge.
Another technique, called as Fast Flux domains, hides the true location of spam, malware and phishing sites by concealing them and rapidly changing addresses of Web proxies.
Business Threats from Botnet attacks
The ability to respond quickly against Botnet intrusion continues to be the most pressing challenge to businesses because-
• It exposes your business and gains access to the confidential data.
• Re-locate or re-configure hosting services and re-programmed to new security developments.
• Used for information theft in the form of financial fraud or corporate espionage.
• Large number of spam blocks the company network’s bandwidth and server utilization without precaution in place.
What can IT administrators do about it?
Stay vigilant, monitor your bandwidth usage, check your logs and the status of your network. Also, increase user awareness training, in terms they can understand, why they should never invite the vampire in.
Help from Security Managed Services
Using a managed service, a customer simply points their Mail Exchanger (MX) record to the third-party provider without having to deploy any on-premise hardware or software. The provider then processes mail, Web traffic, etc. and passes the filtered content to the customer.
The advantages of this approach are that there is virtually no up-front cost, requires little time to manage the service and you can choose for ‘Pay As You Go’ services. Further, leading managed service providers typically operate very robust, multi-layered defenses that are updated continually.
Conclusion
The evolution of Botnets and their threats for business requires an effective approach to the detection and protection against the harm they can inflict. Various managed services can provide an effective layered-defense at the Internet level protecting businesses from attacks and realize other business advantages.
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