A brief history of the 'Botwar'

Symantec's Adrian Covic discusses trends and developments in the fight against botnets.

Back in 2003, security firms saw thousands of PCs infected with the Sobig mass-mailing virus. Later that year, Fizzer malware logged thousands of computers into internet chat rooms.

This was initially perceived only as a problem for IRC (Internet Relay Chat) admins. However, the infected PCs were connected to chat rooms by their human bot-masters, waiting for command and control (C&C) instructions. When MessageLabs Intelligence correlated the malware and spam traffic from each spam sending IP address, the bigger picture was revealed.

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