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Gigantic. Watchdog organization Shadowserver Foundation monitors the number of detected command-and-control servers -- which indicates how many individual botnets are out there -- and the number of clients these servers control.
From November 2006 through May 2007, Shadowserver reported roughly 1,400 command-and-control servers active at any given time, though the number varied hourly and ranged from 1,100 to more than 1,700.
If that sounds like small potatoes, consider that the real problem for enterprises isn't the number of networks but the skyrocketing number of drones they control. From March through May, active drones grew at an alarming rate from about a half million to more than 3 million, the organization says.
Shadowserver doesn't claim this is a count of all the bots and botnets out there, just the ones it detected in active use. No one knows how many machines lie dormant. Some researchers even have made the controversial claim that as many as 11% of the 1.1 billion computers worldwide with Internet access are infected and part of the available bot pool.
Symantec says it found 6 million infected bots in the second half of 2006. Currently, about 3.5 million bots are used to send spam daily, says Gadi Evron, a well-known botnet hunter.
The point is that the scale now is so vast that trying to count bots has become irrelevant, "The number doesn't matter," Evron says. "The bad guys control as many bots as they need to."
In fact, the Department of Justice and FBI have identified more than 1 million victims of botnet crimes.
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Comments (4)
The story does say Windows is most targetedBy Julie Bort on July 11, 2007, 12:09 pmGood points, but if you read more of the story, you'll see that it does say to consider switching from Windows. Look at "Six ways to fight back against botnets"...
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Re: Botnet = computers running Microsoft Windows?By Anonymous on July 10, 2007, 10:58 amIt's not Politically Correct to mention that. I've been interviewed several times about computer security and the interviewer inevitably asks what people can do...
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Botnet = computers running Microsoft Windows?By Dave Lane on July 10, 2007, 7:48 amI believe that the author decided that, for some reason, it wasn't newsworthy to mention that pretty much all computers making up botnets run some variant of Microsoft...
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RE: How big is the botnet problem?By roger on July 10, 2007, 12:33 amiFrame stands for inline frame not invisible frame. Re: How big is the botnet problem?
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