We’ve seen the rise of botnet attacks over the past decade, and they continue to plague organizations for one simple reason: They’re profitable. The operators of botnets can earn significant amounts of money with almost no outlay of capital resources. Whether they’re sending spam messages for fractions of a penny, waging distributed denial-of-service attacks for a few hundred dollars or mining cryptocurrency for thousands of dollars, botnets earn money using resources purchased by other people.

As botnet attacks continue to spread, they also evolve in new and creative ways. While most botnets target endpoints running traditional laptop and desktop operating systems, last year’s Mirai botnet took a different approach by targeting the rapidly growing internet of things (IoT).

Published December 2017 in SearchSecurity
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