Feb

4

How is this Heading off Botnets, Exactly?

Posted by Keith McMillan

February 4, 2008 | Leave a Comment

The CSO feed today had a link to an article about a local (at least to me!) company that is producing a device that automates the detection of network based attacks. The article was headlined “Startup Looks to Head Off Botnets.”

I  chased the link because I think botnets  are a tremendous threat. They put a huge amount of computing power, scattered across the globe, into the hands of a single nefarious individual. These things are responsible for most of the spam you’ re receiving, for internet extortion, for infecting other machines, and probably for tooth decay as well (I’m not 100% about that last point). Seriously, tho, these things are nasty.

So my curiosity was piqued when I read “heading off botnets”. But we’re talking here about the automated detection of attacks. I fail to see how this qualifies as addressing head-on the problem of botnets, and in fact it’s probably a while before we see if anything interesting comes of this.

The article does raise a good point, however, the days of manually generating signatures for attacks are probably near an end, and we do need a new approach for the problems.


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