Botnets and Cyber Security: Battling Online Threats

Abstract

The Internet, originally designed in a spirit of trust, uses protocols and frameworks that are not inherently secure. This basic weakness is greatly compounded by the interconnected nature of the Internet, which, together with the revolution in the software industry, has provided a medium for large-scale exploitation, for example, in the form of botnets. Despite considerable recent efforts, Internet-based attacks, particularly via botnets, are still ubiquitous and have caused great damage on both national and international levels. This chapter provides a brief overview of the botnet phenomena and its pernicious aspects. Current governmental and corporate efforts to mitigate the threat are also described, together with the bottlenecks limiting their effectiveness in various countries. The chapter concludes with a description of lines of investigation that could counter the botnet phenomenon.