White House to tackle botnets

Botnets are the subsequent battleground for US cyber security tsar Howard Schmidt.

Speaking on the McAfee Public Sector summit last week, White House cyber security co-ordinator Schmidt said there were "a considerable number of discussion about botnets" in seeking to identify what number are in the market, what they're doing, what they may do and what the impact can be.

He then said that he had asked his office to interact in a personal-public partnership to improve the nation's cyber security by fighting against botnets.

“We're teaming [with] US internet service providers, se's, internet vendors, privacy rights advocates and groups and trade associations to tackle this on all fronts. We're engaged on developing best practices and an industry code of conduct inside the next 90 days,” he said.

According to Security Affairs, Schmidt said what botnets might do to a business's infrastructure and to personally identifiable information should be detected and understood, but with four million new botnet infections each month, he described it as a moving target.

The working group, which was established in March and can be led by Schmidt, will try and achieve the next goals: to develop principles for addressing the botnets; establish high-level strategies to extend public awareness in regards to the botnets; leverage available consumer-focused information tools and resources to forestall the botnets from the start; and identify ways of measuring progress.

Schmidt said it will be important to behave immediately, but added: “One of the clear issues we cannot be doing to any extent further is to only relax and admire the difficulty. We've done that for too long. We've written strategy after strategy, it is time to move beyond the strategies and really move into an atmosphere where we're executing on these strategies.”

This year has featured lots of activity against botnets, with Kelihos taken down, Zeus disrupted and Koobface command and control servers reportedly being switched off. However, the Flashback botnet targeting Apple computers was detected.

Proposed changes to the law from the ecu Commission would make the possession or distribution of hacking software and tools an offence, and a custodial sentence of at the very least five years will be given where there are aggravating circumstances, along with the use of a tool specifically designed for big-scale attacks, including a botnet.