Botnets & Earth Day: A Common Solution
Strange as it may seem the botnet plague and environmental concerns have a common, partial solution: turning off all those PCs. Botnets, those distributed mass generators of spam, phishing attacks, and denial of service attacks, are getting more and more complex. So are problems like global climate change. We can make a small dent in both by just getting people to turn off their computers at night.
Let's face it, no matter how good our anti-botnet tools and procedures, there are too many people out there with over powered desktops running poorly secured operating systems. They either don't understand, don't care, or don't have the time to prevent their PCs from becoming bots.
On top of that the botnet herders are getting more better at their craft. P2P models have replaced centralized command and control in large botnets. Bots are now starting to protect their hosts to prevent other botnets from taking them over. A recent post at Dark Reading, Botnets Battle Over Turf points out:
the savvier botnets go the extra mile to protect their captor capital: Some actually "secure" the bot machines they have infected so no other botnets can steal them or utilize them, too. They install patches on their bots, for instance, to close the security holes and shut down open ports that are vulnerable to attack.
How do we compete with these guys? We can't just escalate the technical battle, sometimes we need to pull an end run. In this case, we need a simple, low tech solution: turn off infected PCs. This dosen't solve the problem but it helps to lessen the impact. Bots won't be cranking out spam when they are turned off. Besides it will help reduce the carbon dumped in the atmosphere to boot.
The best part is that even the least techno-savvy computer user can work a power button.
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