“Botnet” - Most Serious Network Threat against CyberSecurity Faced by Online Ecosystems and Computing Assets

Abstract

The rapid usages of the Internet over the past few years have facilitated an increase in the incidents of online attacks. One of the most vexing cyber-security threats today is the use of very large, coordinated groups of hosts for brute-force attacks, intrusions, and generating unsolicited emails. The denial of service (DoS) attack is one such powerful attack. If the attack is distributed, it leads to a very significant damage to the network. A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is launched by a mechanism called Botnet through a network of controlled computers. Vulnerable hosts are turned into so-called zombies which can be controlled from afar. A collection of zombies called bots, when controlled by a single command and control (C2) infrastructure, form what is called a Botnet. Botnet are network threats that generally occur from cyber-attacks, which results in serious threats to our network assets and organization’s properties. Malicious botnets are distributed computing platforms predominantly used for illegal activities such as launching Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, sending spam, trojan and phishing emails, illegally distributing pirated media and software, force distribution, stealing information and computing resource, e-business extortion, performing click fraud, and identity theft. In this article we try to provide information on how Botnet facilitate distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that hamper the Web server. Botnets compromise a network of machines with programs (usually referred to as a bot, zombie, or drone) and implement under a command and control (C&C) management infrastructure