The Latest on Botnet Cybercrime

Microsoft has been active in the last few years tracking down various botnets to eradicate networks of cybercrime. Their last successful botnet elimination was the Waldec botnet. Now, at the RSA Conference Europe 2010 in London,  Microsoft  shared evidence to the community from their latest Microsoft Security Intelligence Report (SIRv9), which provides security intelligence on the extent to which botnets, and those supporting them, have become a pivotal for committing cybercrime.

Botnets have become the launching pad for a lot of today’s cyber criminal activity.  Botnets are a valuable asset for their owners, the bot herders,  who make money by leasing them out to other cyber criminals, or hackers, in order to use them as a route to market their cybercrime attacks. They may be involved  spam attacks, phishing attacks,click fraud,  identity theft,  and the distribution of scam emails.  In many ways, they are the perfect base of operations for computer criminals.

Bot herders guard their botnets and invest large amounts of time, effort, and money in developing and making them work to their full capability. They spread their bots by a central command system to thousands or millions of computer users through the distribution of malicious software or user deception. However, they keep a low profile so bots are able to infiltrate computers and devices. They can quietly operate in the background, sometime not even detected for years. The bad thing is that depending on the nature of the bot, an hack attacker may end up with as much or more control over their victim’s computer than has the user.

And the Good New Is?

The good news is that with aggressive, and creative disruption efforts by several groups, the software industry, law enforcement agencies, government entities, and academics; these are all leaving an impact on botnets. There have been successful botnet takedowns against Waledac and the Mariposa botnets. Microsoft led the way on the Waldec and Spanish authorities were successful in the Mariposa bot takedown. These takedowns occured between April and June 2010.

In another development,  Microsoft cleaned botnet infections from more than 6.5 million computers worldwide. And another piece of good news is that the number of industry disclosed vulnerabilities continues to decline; eight percent in the second quarter of 2010 as compared the previous three months. Furthermore, since 2006, Microsoft has seen a 75 percent increase in people using Microsoft’s automatic update service, which contains security updates, and fixes vulnerabilities.