Messaging News - October 2008 - (Page 22)

he reduction in ad spending. A chilling effect on valid e-commerce. Frustrated end-users. The lack of trust in the Internet and Web as a medium. These are the feared outcomes that Christopher Boyd, senior director of Malware Research for FaceTime Security Labs shared with conference attendees at RSA in April when discussing the ramifications of botnets continuing uncontrolled. Is this vendor hype? No, the current scope of the botnet problem continues to grow at a shocking pace. Written almost two years ago, Team Cymru’s whitepaper The Underground Economy: Priceless, by Rob Thomas and Jerry Martin reported, “Fully 61 percent of U.S. computers are infected with spyware and that Americans say they lost more than $336 Million (USD) last year to online fraud. These figures are largely based on self- T saying ‘If we are not careful botnets are going to eat the Internet’ noting that Cerf’s comment was made in 2007. “It is certainly true,” agrees O’Reirdan. “These things are a massive problem.” Consumers and Businesses at Risk The rising tide of botnet armies is largely due to the prominence of the Web. “Our research, as well as research of others, confirms that the Web is one of the biggest in- O’Reirdan agrees that it is not just a consumer problem. “Botnets exist on corporate networks just as they exist on the residential networks run by the ISPs,” he confirms. “Plus they are quite discriminating. A bot sitting on a corporate network is going to be worth more than one sitting on a residential network, and one sitting on a military network is worth even more.” Contributing to the problem is the stealth in the attacks. “Behind the Botnets by Stephanie Jordan reporting, which is often suspect. Given the enormous quantity of data witnessed on numerous Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels, both numbers may be underreported.” Traditionally, Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) has focused on handling messaging abuse. “It is very good work and it is what we need to do and it has been effective at suppressing messaging abuse on the Internet,” says Michael O’Reirdan, MAAWG chairperson. “But given the rise of the botnets, it would be a bit like when a child has measles, and you paint over the spots on the face rather than dealing with the germs themselves. We are turning our focus now to dealing with the bots.” O’Reirdan passes on the observance of Vint Cerf, most often credited with being the father of the Internet, as 22 MESSAGING NEWS OCTOBER 2008 Go Marching On fection vectors,” states Ashar Aziz, founder and CEO of FireEye, Inc. Several years ago the early reports of zombies (compromised PCs) seemed to point to the Internet Service Provider (ISP) as the one that needed to address the problem. But today consumer machines are not the only ones being taken hostage. “If Web malware, by and large is proliferating botnet infrastructures today, then when you think about it, it is no longer a consumer issue. It is now an enterprise issue because all businesses—large or small—go to the Web. While you may have firewalls to block port 135 and other sorts of things that may still infect consumers, they are wide open on the port 80 front, and therefore, this infection vector affects everybody that visits the Web,” explains Aziz. scenes and below the surface, iFrame injections are taking your browser on a tour of different malicious Web sites without you even knowing it,” says Arnie Bjorklund, VP sales and business development for MXTools. “Your browser could be going to Singapore, Russia, China and all these places, and you wouldn’t even know it. It has been incredibly easy for these guys to build armies of botnets on demand.” MXTools provides sales and technical support for the Spamhaus Datafeed Service. “Spamhaus is generally regarded as a key piece of the best practices approach to protecting email systems from the onslaught of messaging abuse,” states Bjorklund. “The Spamhaus Project started out as a free open source project, but in some ways has become a victim of it’s own success. Due to the

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Messaging News - October 2008

Messaging News - October 2008 Contents Editor’s Note Short Takes Targeting the Technology-Wise Customer The Insider Threat: The New Era of Disaster Recovery Making Collaboration Tools Pro-Knowledge Sharing Botnets Go Marching On Dissecting Email Forensics Next in Messaging News “On Message” with Ben Gross The World is Not the Center of the Universe, and Filters Don’t Stop Email Spam Making the Case Learn More

Messaging News - October 2008

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