Up To 9 Percent Of Machines In An Enterprise Are Bot-Infected

"Bot infections are on the rise in the enterprise, and most come from botnets you've never heard of nor ever will.

In a three-month study of more than 600 different botnets found having infiltrated enterprise networks, researchers from Damballa discovered nearly 60 percent are botnets that contain only a handful to a few hundred bots built to target a particular organization. Only 5 percent of the bot infections were from big-name botnets, such as Zeus/ZDbot and Koobface.

And Damballa has seen bot infections grow in enterprises as well, from 5 to 7 percent of an enterprise's IP address space and hosts last year, to 7 to 9 percent of them bot-infected this year. "Of all the enterprises where we've gone into who are customers or as proof-of-concept, 100 percent have had botnet infections," says Gunter Ollmann, vice president of research for Damballa. "It's more the smaller, customized and targeted types of botnets [that infect the enterprise]."

Read more...