Top Botnets Control Some 1 Million Hijacked Computers

Puskas writes "Joe Stewart is the director of malware research at SecureWorks, and presented a dire view of the current botnet landscape at the RSA conference this week. He conducted a survey of the top spamming 'nets, extrapolating their size from the volume of emails that flow across the internet. By his calculations, the top 11 networks control just over a million machines, hitting inboxes with some 100 billion messages a day. 'The botnet at the top of the chart is Srizbi. According to Stewart, this botnet — which also goes by the names "Cbeplay" and "Exchanger" — has an estimated 315,000 bots and can blast out 60 billion messages a day. While it may not have gotten the publicity that Storm has during the last year, it's built around a much more substantial collection of hijacked computers, said Stewart. In comparison, Storm's botnet counts just 85,000 machines, only 35,000 of which are set up to send spam. Storm, in fact, is No. 5 on Stewart's list.'"

Comments

Re:How do I tell...?

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

I'm a smart software developer, so I'm pretty sure my computer is not affected (secured hardware firewall, etc). But how can I be sure? format c:\ [Enter]

Re:Take away their licenses

[raju1kabir]

There are plenty of things that your home computer can't do. It can't push BGP updates to backbone routers, are you up in arms about that?

The reason I am not taking your mail is not because you are at home. It is because you are wholly unauthenticated and trying to use my system's resources. 99.99% of the people matching those characteristics are spammers.

Solve the authentication problem, and I'll happily take your mail.

I can think of two easy ways offhand:

1. Your email server can deliver via your ISP's SMTP forwarder. At least then someone is taking responsibility for it.
2. You can get a static IP and proper reverse DNS from your ISP.