Six ways to fight back against botnets

Botnets are a growing threat, but there are six steps that security professionals can take to fight back.

1. Hire a Web-filtering service.

Web-filtering services are one of the best ways to fight bots. These services scan for Web sites exhibiting unusual behavior or known malicious activity and block those sites from users.

Websense, Cyveillance and FaceTime Communications are examples. All monitor the Internet in real time to find Web sites engaged in suspicious activity, such as downloading JavaScript and performing screen scrapes and other tricks outside the boundaries of normal Web browsing. Cyveillance and Support Intelligence also offer services that notify Web-site operators and ISPs that malware has been discovered, so hacked servers can be fixed, they say.

2. Switch browsers

Another tactic to prevent bot infections is to standardize on a browser other than Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox, the two most popular and hence the browsers for which most malware is written. The same tactic works for operating systems. Macs statistically are safe from botnets, as is desktop Linux, because most bot herders target Windows.