CircleID

Botnets are networks of infected PCs, usually with broadband Internet connections that are co-opted by hackers and used to send spam and virus attacks. Often they are compromised without their owner's knowledge. We started to see these botnets kick in back in September of 2006

Jesus. He first saw botnets in 2006? Now that's late. Real late - and probably not what you want to admit in a PR whitepaper being fed to media.

Suresh Ramasubramanian said:

Jesus. He first saw botnets in 2006? Now that's late. Real late - and probably not what you want to admit in a PR whitepaper being fed to media.

Its quite possibly accurate. I saw a shift around the middle to late 2006 from the previous use of open relays, Chinese ISPs and free trial accounts to active abuse of the increasingly bandwidth-rich and insecure home user segment via increasingly sophisticated trojans and worms, which indeed were using the same botnet technology that had been used for DDOS attacks. IIRC, the ORDB closed up shop around the same period as there were fewer and fewer attackers chasing fewer and fewer open relays.

Before then, the major danger from compromised machines was the virus and worm traffic probing and of course the aformentioned DDOS packet storms.... it was more an abusive kiddie tool than a serious commercial resource.

Well, viruses emitting spam started off with sobig / sober, at least two years before 2006 - shall we say 2004.

Those two were the first, crudest version of spam emitting botnets, I'd say.