Fergie's Tech Blog

Bringing Botnets Out of the Shadows

Brian Krebs writes in The Washington Post:

Botnets are the workhorses of most online criminal enterprises today, allowing hackers to ply their trade anonymously -- sending spam, sowing infected PCs with adware from companies that pay for each installation, or hosting fraudulent e-commerce and banking Web sites.

As the profit motive for creating botnets has grown, so has the number of bot-infected PCs. David Dagon, a Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech who has spent several years charting the global spread of botnets, estimates that in the 13-month period ending in January, more than 13 million PCs around the world were infected with malicious code that turned them into bots.

posted by Fergie @ 3/21/2006 07:16:00 AM