Botnets from Inside Major Corporations

Botnets are a major problem, and are used for sending spam, attacking web hosts, and other nefarious purposes. Imagine a scene from your favorite zombie movie, that shows all of the heroes friends and neighbors (and others in the thousands) acting mindless and with only the destruction of the hero on their mind.

Support Intelligence is a security based company that has been trying to bring down botnets wherever it finds them, and has been seeing a number of the zombies (members of the botnet) showing up in major Fortune 500 companies. When brought to the attention of these companies, they ignore the complaint or promise to get to it “Real Soon Now.”

Support Intelligence decided that they had enough, and started publishing the names of these companies on their blog and the actual IPs of the hosts that were sending spam and otherwise members of these botnets. Companies mentioned include Intel, Banc of America Securities, and IndymacBank. This story even made the BBC (who managed to contain their zombies promptly).

The problems are not just outside the corporate firewall, but also from behind the firewall.
Lesson to be learned here is don’t wait, don’t put it off, don’t push it aside - take care of the zombies now!