Fergie's Tech Blog

Bot-Slaying ISP Hall of Fame

Brian Krebs writes on Security Fix:

"Botnets" -- large armies of hijacked personal computers that bad guys use for everything from spamming to knocking Web sites offline -- are a constant security threat to business and home users alike. Disabling the online communications channels that cyber criminals use to control these drone armies is no easy feat, as more than a million individual bots are enslaved by virus writers each month. But some Internet service providers (ISPs) do a far better job than others at disrupting these networks, and as such deserve special attention for their efforts.

Enter the folks at Shadowserver.org -- a group of volunteer security junkies who purposefully infect their own computers with new hacker code each day in order to track down and infiltrate botnets and report details to ISPs about the most active and pernicious botnets on their networks. Shadowserver this week launched its "Hall of Fame" page, naming Comcast Corp. and a handful of other ISPs large and small as the most responsive in slaying botnet control channels.

posted by Fergie @ 7/28/2006 12:52:00 PM