special report So you can't hear them, and you can't see them, and really there is nothing there to tell you if you have them on your system. But be warned, bots are with us, and they do have a search-and-destroy attitude that could be the death of your business.
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Contents 
What are they?
Taking a gamble
An Australian story
Attacking the bots
Sidebar: Getting to the bottom of bots
Sidebar: Bot facts
Sidebar: Keeping your botside covered |
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At about the same time I, Robot came to our screens, hackers were already about to launch a robotic attack of the virtual kind -- using bundles of code known as bots to exert control over the cyberworld.
Each day, as computer users unassumingly logged on, more and more bots gained control, multiplying from 2000 monitored bots a day (as measured by Symantec at the end of 2003) to an average of 30,000 this past June. (Spikes of 75,000 were also measured during this period.)
Unlike Asimov's NS5 (the robot that, apart from one AI being, assumed a mass personality) bots come in many different individual forms. Like the NS5 though, network bots do have power in numbers.
You forgot to point out that 99% of bots only affect windows based machines :) and something as simple as following a basic security model would stop most bots dead in their tracks.
Like most malicious application in windows, bots need to write registry values into the windows registry; a normally user account only has write access to HKEY_CURRENT_USER which isn't enough to cause any serious damage to the operating system, this also greatly simplifies removal.
While I agree with the approach both yourself and Gibson have taken (scare tactic), I think you really should have been more emotive and stressed on user education. Believe it or not its not impossible to take down a botnet and with other attacks types such a DRDOS (distributed reflected denial of service) and DEDOS (distributed email denial of service) botnets can be considered small fry.
I believe everyone in the chain needs to do there part to help solve this problem. ISP's monitor ICMP and UDP activities which are normally related to botnet floods, most even egress filter these days to stop s****ing. Software vendors are constantly improve default security policies or providing updates to ensure machines aren't as easier infected. We as end user need to do as much as we can to secure our machines regardless of operating system. With higher security awareness and education comes "more" secure machines, remember there can't be botnets without insecure machines.