25 May 2010

FTC closes botnet

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has shut down a botnet that had been known to distribute spam and malware throughout Europe.

Sebastian Zabala, a security expert and senior project manager for the UK and Sweden for Panda Security, said the setting up of botnets can be a labour-intensive operation and it takes a great deal of effort to shut them down completely.

He commented: "You have the internet service provider who takes care of actually handling the servers, then you have the ones operating the botnet servers, then you have a different group taking information from that and so on."

As a result, Mr Zabala showed how the setting up of these malware dissemination sites can be a large group effort.

According to Sunbelt Software, the ten most prevalent malware threats for March 2010 included seven Trojan programs, making this the most common cause for concern for IT infrastructure managers during the month.