ISPs Need to Respond to Botnets
If the bad guys aren't bad enough, the good guys (or at least neutral) guys in the malware battle are not helping these days. I'm talking about ISPs who turn a blind eye or respond slowly to reports of botnet activity. The Register reports:
Talk to anyone who makes a living sniffing out online fraud, and you'll hear the same story over and over. Researcher uncovers the source of a massive amount of spam, identifies an IP address that is part of a botnet or stumbles upon a phishing site that's spoofing a trusted online brand. Researcher dutifully reports the incident to the internet service provider whose network is being used, only to find the bad behavior continues unabated for days, weeks and even months.A lack of engagement from ISPs is nothing new, but it has continued even as the malware scourge makes steady gains.
Botnets are spewing out spam, launching data theft attacks (like the recent eBay attack) and they are growing so large they rival supercomputers in raw power. It is in the ISPs own best interest to shut down these spam machines which just suck up bandwidth. I wonder how much bandwidth could be recovered if more botnets were shut down? Would Comcast have to continue to shut down download hogs?
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