North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Reporting botnets?

  • From: Bill Nash
  • Date: Wed Jan 11 11:48:24 2006


There are companies/products that specialize in mitigating C&C traffic in a fairly elegant manner.

One specific one that we've had good experiences with is Mainnerv's Darknet product. They deploy a box on the network, interfacing with your enterprise via a BGP peer, which issues a handful of routes to actively blackhole, intercept, and analyzer traffic to known C&C's that are being actively tracked. That part isn't too exotic, their strength lies in the good intelligence processes on their side, for maintaining their blackhole listing.

The implementation impact is minimal and trojan outbreaks are generally stopped dead even as the compromise is taking effect. As a proactive measure, it's a fast way to spot compromised machines within your network even as the malignant activity is mitigated.

- billn

On Tue, 10 Jan 2006, Martin Hannigan wrote:



Please advise, where to can I report botnet control activities?
I'm from overseas and interested if there are some law enforcement
organizations in US who may handle these issues?

I assume it is illegal business in US, and I have enough evidence
how botnet control sites command our trojaned customer PC's to send
spam and activate DDoS attacks.





I think your best bet is to report it first to your local authorities
and then report it to the ISP that the C&C is sitting on. There are
techniques that have been established over time and a few things
you can do to mitigate, at least temporarily, (1) identify it and any
others (2) make sure that taking action won't cause collateral damage
or important stuff runs on it and blackhole it, (3) contact the dns
provider and ask them to (a) lock out the user, (b) extend the TTl
to the max that their software allows, (c) change the C&C resolution
to 127.0.03. That will at least do some level of mitigation and allow
you to clean up the mess while you figure out how you want to pursue
it.

I'm sure you'll also hear from some people on this list who can assist.

Botnets are a dime a dozen. It's good to kill the C&C's and it's
good to report them to LEA's, but from there, all bets are off.

I believe any action would depend on exactly what they were doing
with them. For example, if it's a bunch of skiddies fighting over
who controls an iRC channel and they are DDOS'ing each other, well,
that may not get much attention.

Hope that helps.
-M<