Experts find difficulties in judging the size of malicious botnets
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Online security researchers working to cripple botnets of malware-infected computers have occasionally run into trouble when trying to estimate the extent of a given botnet.
An article in eWeek says that a simple count of IP addresses being used by a botnet is often misleading, both because some infected machines are likely to be inactive at a given time, and also because several computers can hide behind each address. Additionally, many botnets are operated by clever cyber criminals who constantly shift their activities in order to confuse security professionals.
The eWeek article also says that efforts to map the Torpig botnet found 182,000 unique bots active over a 10-day period, using 1,247,642 different IP addresses. Torpig has made headlines recently with its use of encrypted Twitter messages to spread itself to new hosts.
Once botnets reach a sufficient size, say experts, they are frequently sold by their creators to users hoping to commit various online crimes, including DDoS attacks that are impossible to trace to the instigator or waves of malicious spam.
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