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Submitted by: Bill Hickey
NCVA List Master
NRT-0206 FBI Finds Over 1 million Botnet Victims:
The Department of Justice and FBI said ongoing investigations have identified more than 1 million botnet crime victims. The FBI is working with industry partners, including the Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center at Carnegie-Mellon University, to notify the victim owners of the computers. Microsoft and the Botnet Task Force have also helped out the FBI. Through this process the FBI may uncover additional incidents in which botnets have been used to facilitate other criminal activity. The FBI and Justice Department have an ongoing cyber crime initiative to disrupt and dismantle botnets, known as Operation Bot Roast. Bots are widely recognized as one of the top scourges of the industry. Gartner predicts that by year-end 75% of enterprises "will be infected with undetected, financially motivated, targeted malware that evaded traditional perimeter and host defenses," and early reports from beta customers of a yet-to-be-released product from MI5 show how nefarious these infections can be. MI5 says it installed a web security beta product at an organization with 12,000 nodes and in one month detected 22 active bots, 123 inactive bots, and was watching another 313 suspected bots. That may not sound like much, but those bots were responsible for 136 MILLION bot-related incidents, such as scanning for other hosts inside a firewall.
(Network World 13JUN07)