FBI: Operation Bot Roast Finds Over 1 Million Botnet Victims Network World (06/13/07) Cooney, Michael
as it appeared in the June 18, 2007 edition of ACM TechNews.
The FBI and the Department of Justice announced that their ongoing cyber-crime investigations have so far detected over 1 million victims of botnet crime. Operation Bot Roast aims to interrupt and dismantle botherders and has caught three major botnet operators so far, including "Spam King" Robert Alan Soloway. Bots are considered to be one of the top industry scourges. Their destructiveness is illustrated by a report from Mi5 describing how Mi5 installed a Web security beta product at a company with 12,000 nodes and identified 22 active bots, 123 inactive bots, and 313 suspected bots within one month. The discovered bots had caused 136 million bot-related episodes. In addition, after examining over 4.5 million Web pages, Google researchers reported that 10 percent of Web pages were booby-trapped with malware, and 16 percent seemed to contain dangerous code. By accidentally permitting access to their computers, unknowing computer owners permit their computers to be employed as vehicles for crimes such as denial-of-service attacks and phishing. Botnets are also increasingly threatening to national security, due to their ability to be widely distributed. Operation Bot Roast plans to inform the unwitting owners of hijacked computers. Meanwhile, citizens can guard against botnets by adhering to strong computer security practices. Click Here to View Full Article
