The Silent Epidemic of Botnets By Jim Hedger
If, as author Philip K. Dick wondered, robots dream of electronic sheep, their collectivist cyber-equivalents, botnets live for the fleece. Used to enable or commit several types of fraud, including click fraud against PPC providers such as Google, Yahoo and the host of smaller pay-per-click programs, botnets are proliferating across the Internet at an alarming rate. The only thing matching the increase in criminal use of botnets is the increasing sophistication of their operators.
“The level of sophistication that we’re seeing – and the speed at which new fraudster techniques are introduced – is tremendous,” says Keren Levy, director of the Online Threats Managed Services group at RSA Security. In June of this year RSA Security and Panda Software collaborated to detect and dismantle one of hundreds of botnets operating online, one that was specifically designed to commit click fraud.
“Botnets are a silent epidemic,” states Ryan Sherstobitoff from Panda Software as he ducks behind a row of trade-show booths to find a quieter place to speak. “The botnet we recently helped dismantle with RSA had infected over 50,000 computers with the Clickbot.A Trojan. Imagine if each of those 50,000 computers made the botnet controller one dollar each day the system operated. If it takes us a few weeks to shut him down, the operator makes millions.”
