Obama declared war on botnets

The administration of US President Barack Obama has launched a new initiative aimed at combating computer viruses and botnets. In Washington, they say they are constantly faced with networks of infected computers that regularly attack workstations and servers of the Obama administration.

Thus, according to Howard Schmidt, coordinator of cybersecurity programs at the White House, the problem with botnets is becoming increasingly urgent, as activity is constantly growing.

The program stipulates that Internet providers and corporate users will have to exchange data about botnets and detected outbreaks of computer infections, CyberSecurity.ru reports.

In addition, the White House presented a strict set of principles aimed at preventing the emergence of botnets, as well as their early detection.

The White House, according to Bloomberg, also intends to involve the Pentagon and the US Federal Communications Commission in its initiative.

A botnet, we recall, is a network consisting of hosts running “bots” (short for the word “robot”) - autonomous software. Most often, a bot in a botnet is a program that is secretly installed on the victim’s computer and allows the attacker to perform certain actions using the resources of the infected computer.

Botnets are used for various types of illegal or unwanted activities: sending spam, brute-forcing passwords on a remote system, denial of service (DDoS) attacks, etc. Botnet attacks can bring down not only large Internet resources, but also entire segments of the Internet.

In theory, not only the authorities are interested in reducing the activity of malicious programs, but also the providers themselves, who always risk coming into conflict with colleagues or ending up on the “black lists” of anti-spam organizations.

McAffee estimates that there are now about 5 million computers in botnets around the world.