Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » Global counterattack on zombie menace

May 27, 2005 | Comments: (0)

Global counterattack on zombie menace

TAGS: Security

"Operation Spam Zombies" is a worldwide effort to educate Internet Service Providers (ISPs) about the dangers of botnets and their role in the spread of spam.

Twenty countries have signed on and several government agencies, including the Federal Trade Commission in the U.S., have signed on to send information to more than 3,000 ISPs around the world in an effort to disable destructive botnets.

Botnets or zombie networks are groups of computers that have been infected by malware that allow the malware to control the infected PC and use it to send spam or launch distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

A recent survey of CipherTrust estimated that 350,000 PCs a month are being recruited into this zombie army. So far in May, CipherTrust researchers found an average of 172,009 new zombies identified each day. Other surveys have suggested that there are millions of PCs worldwide that can generate spam or create DDoS attacks. Researchers from the Honeynet Project tracked more than 100 active botnets, including one containing 50,000 compromised "zombie" machines.

CipherTrust recently introduced a ZombieMeter, a new online resource that tracks worldwide zombie activity in real-time. The ZombieMeter can be downloaded at CipherTrust's website.

According to the FTC, these letters will recommend that ISPs should be proactive in identifying those computers on their networks that are sending large amounts of e-mail and discover whether they are being used as zombies. The letter suggests infected machines be "quarantined" until the zombie software is removed.

The 20 countries involved are already members of the London Action Plan, an international coalition aimed at preventing spam. Among those signed up to the initiative are the U.S., Canada, Denmark, Japan, Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, Taiwan and the United Kingdom. China, which has been a growing source for botnets, has yet to join.

Posted by Bob Francis on May 27, 2005 09:05 AM

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