The botnet landscape - live threats and steps for mitigation

Wednesday 3 October 14:00 - 15:30, Small talks

Simon Forster (Spamhaus Technology Ltd)

The Spamhaus Project, working with organizations across the internet for almost two decades, provides continuously updated threat intelligence regarding botnets and botnet controller activity. Threat intelligence is continuously delivered in real time, and this Small Talk complements this with a description of up-to-date trends in the botnet threat landscape and recommendations for network security managers, data protection practitioners and CISO/CIOs.

The Small Talk contains analysis with practical recommendations for the audience including:

• Hosting providers: Why they can be vulnerable, how cybercriminals exploit vulnerabilities and what hosting companies can do to improve their protection.
• The rise of anonymisation techniques and how to mitigate the risk.
• The increasing use of well-regarded cloud providers by cybercriminals to host botnets.
• The role of Registries and Registrars to prevent fraudulent domain registrations.

The Small Talk will also cover live botnet threats that can be seen at https://www.deteque.com/live-threat-map/ which is provided by Deteque, a division of Spamhaus and integrated with a global network of service providers and researchers dedicated to combating DNS abuse.

Botnet controllers play a core role in operations conducted by cybercriminals who are using infected machines to send out spam and ransomware, launch DDoS attacks, commit ebanking fraud and click-fraud, or to mine cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.

An infected machine can be a desktop computer, smartphone or an IoT device such as a webcam or Network Attached Storage that is connected to the internet. The wide scope of infected devices and the actions of cybercriminals to exploit legitimate networks means that an understanding of botnet activity is a must for every network security manager.

Other VB2018 papers

Back to VB2018 Programme page