The Botnet Chronicles

A Journey to Infamy

Botnets are considered one of the most prevalent and dangerous threats lurking on the Web today.The damage they cause can range from information theft and malware infection to fraud and other crimes.A botnet refers to a network of bots or zombie computers widely used for malicious criminal activities like spamming, distributed denial-ofservice (DDoS) attacks,and/or spreading FAKEAV malware variants.A botnet connects to command-and-control (C&C) servers,enabling a bot master or controller to make updates and to add new components to it.This white paper examines where the first botnets came from and how they have evolved over the past 10 years to become some of the biggest cybercrime perpetrators on the Web at present.

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