Fergie's Tech Blog

Why So Little Attention to Botnets?

Ed Felten writes over on Freedom to Tinker:

Our collective battle against botnets is going badly, according to Ryan Naraine’s recent article in eWeek.

What’s that? You didn’t know we were battling botnets? You’re not alone. Though botnets are a major cause of Internet insecurity problems, few netizens know what they are or how they work.

In this context, a “bot” is a malicious software agent that gets installed on an unsuspecting user’s computer. Bots get onto computers by exploiting security flaws. Once there, they set up camp and wait unobtrusively for instructions. Bots work in groups, called “botnets”, in which many thousands of bots (hundreds of thousands, sometimes) all over the Net work together at the instruction of a remote badguy.

posted by Fergie @ 10/26/2006 12:31:00 PM