Botnets. Can't live with 'em, can't live without ... well, actually we could live without them just fine, thank you very much. These massive networks of compromised computers send out billions of spam emails a day, spread malware and computer viruses, often with the goal of creating more "bots" for the botnet, and generally cause mischief all over the Internet for businesses and computers.
Now leading Internet security vendor Check Point Software has come up with a special tool for defending against botnets—and a new infographic that breaks down just what it is that botnets do (below).
Check Point's new Anti-Bot Software Blade is a business-targeted solution that discovers bots in contact with a company's servers and blocks communication between infected hosts and the remote operators known as "bot-herders" who run such massive botnets as Rustock (13.8 billion spam emails sent a day), Bagle (6.3 billion), and Festi (4.2 billion).
And those are just some of the botnets we know about, as Check Point notes.
"While there have been several highly publicized botnets, most attacks are hard to identify and can proliferate silently without an organization's knowledge," the security firm says.
"Cybercriminals today are implementing a variety of stealthy techniques to avoid detection—often disabling PC anti-virus software to hide their presence or leveraging encryption and alternative protocols to masquerade as legitimate traffic. Bots are also often used as tools in targeted attacks known as Advanced Persistent Threats (APT), such as Stuxnet and Operation Aurora."
The Check Point blade solution is purpose-built to prevent malicious software distributed by cybercriminals from taking over PCs and making them part of a remote-controlled botnet that taps the collective resources of a massive number of compromised PCs to execute such activities as stealing data, conducting network intrusions, sending out spam, and initiating Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks to take down websites.
While the new Check Point product is probably only going to make sense for small to mid-sized IT operations and not individual consumers, regular PC users can still make sure to have a good, up-to-date security software package installed on their computer.
After all, the only thing worse than having your computer slammed with spam and malware from a botnet is having it become part of the botnet itself.
