Spamhaus Tells Us That Botnets Are Getting Worse

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Spamhaus Tells Us That Botnets Are Getting Worse

	By John Levine Author, Consultant & Speaker
	January 01, 2015 Views: 10,003 Add Comment

The Spamhaus Project just published a long article about the botnets they’ve been watching during 2014. As this chart shows, we’re not making any progress. (Yellow bars are bot controllers on compromised hosts, red bars are dedicated controllers.)

They also note that the goals of botnets have changed. While in the past they were mostly used to send spam, now they’re stealing banking and financial information, engaging in click fraud, and used for DDoS and other malicious mischief.

Some countries and in particular some ISPs are much much worse than others. They have charts of providers and countries. While some of the countries are ones you’d expect, notably Russia, the three worst providers are in France, Germany, and the Netherlands. I’m painfully familiar with those three, who are distinguished by their very poor abuse management, and chronic failure to enforce their nominal terms of service or to deal with abuse reports. (They are also all very cheap, which is no coincidence.)

Read the whole thing. It refrains from pointing fingers, but it’s obvious who needs to get to work to address the problem.

By John Levine, Author, Consultant & Speaker

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