Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Are You Botnet-ing With Me?

Informative and recently released study by ENISA on the problem of botnets, especially the emphasis on how client side vulnerabilities surpassed email attachments, and downloading of infected files as infection vectors. Not because these aren't working, but because of the botnet's masters attitude for achieving malicious economies of scale has changed. Despite that we can question whether or not they put so much efforts while strategizing this, let's say they stopped pushing malware, and started coming up with ways for the end users to pull it for themselves :

"The most common infection methods are browser exploits (65%), email attachments (13%,) operating system exploits (11%), and downloaded Internet files (9%). Currently, the most dangerous infection method is surfing to an infected webpage. Indications of a bot on your computer include e.g.: Slow Internet connection, strange browser behavior (home page change, new windows, unknown plug-ins), disabled anti-virus software; unknown autostart programs etc."

Here's the entire publication - "Botnets - The Silent Threat" by David Barroso.

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