Is the Botnet Battle Already Lost?

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers are finding it practically futile to keep up with evolving botnet attacks. 'We've known about [the threat from] botnets for a few years, but we're only now figuring out how they really work, and I'm afraid we might be two to three years behind in terms of response mechanisms,' said Marcus Sachs, a deputy director in the Computer Science Laboratory of SRI International, in Arlington, Va. There is a general feeling of hopelessness as botnet hunters discover that, after years of mitigating command and controls, the effort has largely gone to waste. 'We've managed to hold back the tide, but, for the most part, it's been useless,' said Gadi Evron, a security evangelist at Beyond Security, in Netanya, Israel, and a leader in the botnet-hunting community. 'When we disable a command-and-control server, the botnet is immediately re-created on another host. We're not hurting them anymore.' There is an interesting image gallery of a botnet in action as discovered by security researcher Sunbelt Software."

Comments

you don't know what you're talking about

[oohshiny]

Sue the IRC networks first; that's what makes it dumb shit easy for these guys to set up their botnets.

That's like saying "sue the website networks for distributing illegal content". IRC is a chat protocol. Anybody can run it. It is also widely used for open source development and other legitimate services. Apparently, your mind has been warped so badly by Instant Messaging services that you think any such service needs to be controlled by some big corporate entity.

I had a machine hacked by a german movie filesharing group, [...] by a group that hacked unix systems.

I strongly suspect you're just spreading FUD: you don't sound like you're in any position to run a UNIX system, and even if you are, based on your comments, you don't sound capable of securing it, so it's no surprise that you got hacked.