How ISPs Can Help Fight Botnets and Cybercrime

[Peaches]

How ISPs Can Help Fight Botnets and Cybercrime

Cybercrime is a day-to-day reality for anyone using the Internet. Whether for email or Web surfing, all Internet users are potentially at risk.

Botnets are the tool of choice for distributing malware, for perpetrating attacks, and for sending slews of spammed messages. Through these botnets, botnet herders (the cybercriminals behind the botnets), earn millions of dollars in money stolen from innocent computer users.

These cybercriminals buy and sell services, build partnerships, and rent services just as above-board businesses do; the main difference being the legitimacy and legality of the products, solutions, and services they handle. The quantity of spammed messages distributed via botnets is astronomical. Spam continues to be a vector of choice for cybercriminals owing to their speed of distribution and delivery, vast target list, and relatively low cost of investment compared with the profit on offer.

As an example of how and why the spam issue is still overwhelming, according to Trend Micro research, spam now accounts for around 97 percent of all the email in circulation. In a recent laboratory-controlled investigation, the quantity of spam generated by a single bot-infested computer in a 24-hour period amounted to around 2,553,940.

Full story - http://blog.trendmicro.com/