A Brief History of Malware and Cybercrime
12 notable developments in three decades of online threats, with notes on responses.
When it began: The SoBig email worm of 2003 is thought to be the first organized attempt to create large-scale Botnets. Today, an estimated one million PCs are under the control of hackers worldwide, according to Trend Micro. In early 2005, German security analysts at Aachen University reported that they identified more than 100 botnets in a three-month period. These botnets ranged in size from a few hundred compromised PCs to 50,000 machines.
What it is: Botnets are networked groups of compromised computers—or zombies—that are controlled by hackers known as Bot herders, usually through Trojan software that users have clicked on. Using various Internet communications methods, including Internet Relay Chat, hackers can "wake up" tens of thousands of compromised computers (hence, zombies) and direct them to deliver spam, phishing attacks and crimeware.
Response: Null-routing, in which the ISP collects all of the traffic going to a site; network monitoring; takedown services from security vendors that attempt to trace the source of the attack and shut it down.
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