News: Frustrated White-Hats!!

Security research teams monitoring the relative strength and activity of some of the world's largest botnets  are confined by legal restraints making them virtually powerless to stop them, according to a researcher at Kaspersky Lab Japan.

The botnet ecosystem is flourishing as a result of ineffective measures being undertaken by security researchers to get them shut down, Vitaly Kamluk, chief security expert at Kaspersky, told hundreds of incident response team members, Wednesday, at the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST) Conference 2010. Kamluk painted a bleak picture of the rising sophistication of botnets and the underground business environment that fuels them.

"We have to do more and more on the technical side," Kamluk said. "We have to introduce more technical solutions to break the loop and destroy the infrastructures that make the malware usable."

Kamluk explained how cybercriminals have undertaken measures to oversee deal making between the botnet owners and the users who are renting them out. A guarantor or mediator, who typically is the owner of an established Web forum for cybercriminal activity, oversees deals and gets a cut of the action. The goal is to build a level of trust between the two and rule out cheaters who don't pay for the botnet services, he said.

"Guarantors kind of have respect and a profile," Kamluk said. "They're more trusted than a newly registered person on the forum and they provide the reliability of the deal."

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