The late-2006 appearance of durable botnets was a tipping point in the back-and-forth battle against spammers, an industry analyst said Friday, who predicted that spam will continue to gain ground on defenses.
Assembled by a Trojan called SpamThru, the new botnets are tougher to bring down, says Paul Wood, senior analyst with MessageLabs, a message security and filtering service. "The advent of Trojans like SpamThru makes it possible for each bot in the net to learn about the location of other bots. When a bot goes down or the command and control channel is compromised, the other bots know about it."
In SpamThru's techniques, if a control server is shut down, the spammer can easily update the rest of the bots with the location of a new server as long as he controls at least one bot in the net. And if a specific bot is shut down, its spam load can be quickly shifted to another, as-yet-undiscovered, bot.
"Until now, it's not been possible to regain control of a [compromised] botnet," says Wood. "This makes botnets much more resilient."
And that, says Wood, is bad news for companies and consumers plagued by a tidal wave of spam since September and October. "In the last few months, certainly from September-October, spam has become much more aggressive."
Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
Maintaining existing network infrastructures often incurs huge technical debt before newer technologies are adopted over time.
Amid ongoing regional uncertainties, telecom infrastructure in the Middle East has expand to include terrestrial low-latency network infrastructure, which offers resilience and agility in navigating political complexities without relying solely on undersea networks.
