I admit it. I’m fascinated by these incredibly wide reaching criminal enterprises. From everything I’d read in the past about the location of botnet servers I’d thought most were outside the USA, and mainly in Asia:
“In recent repot on Monsters and Critics, Symantec and their Security Threat Report, gained a lot of attention because of trends in botnets and their location. Those numbers showed that Asia had overtaken Britain as the leader in the volume of zombie computers.” – Steve Ragan (Monsters and Critics)
In fact, according to a past Shadowserver Foundation report, there are over one million botnets on the net. Not all are active at any given time and no one has a full explanation of the reason for that.
Anyway, McAfee has put out a rather interesting report: The USA is the major hive for botnets – by far. Benjamin Cruz has published these findings:
“Here’s the list of top 10 countries hosting active command servers:
- United States – 631
- British Virgin Islands- 237
- Netherlands – 154
- Russia – 125
- Germany – 95
- Korea – 81
- Switzerland – 77
- Australia – 63
- China – 48
- Canada – 38”
- http://blogs.mcafee.com/mcafee-labs/botnet-control-servers-span-the-globe
By map (it’s a nice representation):
Of course, this only describes server location, not the location of those profiting from the illegal exploitation of people by those botnets.
A recent article (sorry, I misplaced the url) in fact dealt with this. When things start getting warm for a given botnet (and even before that), it is shut down (also, the malware governed through those C&C servers) only to wake up at subsequent times. So, while getting the servers is important, it’s more important to get the criminal organizations responsible for them.
It seems that as long as there will be servers and computers, there will be botnets. They’ll get taken down (or not) but there have to be better tools to find the individuals operating these botnets – to trace the money flow (“Follow the money” - Deep Throat), and where/to whom it’s going. Without that, the whole exercise is rather futile.
Source:
http://www.neowin.net/news/the-united-states-is-a-hive-for-botnets