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Botnet command & control malware - the highs and lows of 2018 - Spamhaus Technology

The team at Spamhaus Malware Labs detected and blocked a record number of botnet command & control (C&C). Over 10,000 in fact. Here's what was driving the increase.

by The Spamhaus TeamFebruary 12, 20193 minutes reading time
Malware
Threat Intelligence

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Introduction

The team at Spamhaus Malware Labs were pretty busy last year. Actually, that’s an understatement: they detected and blocked a record number of botnet command & control (C&C). Over 10,000 in fact!Here’s an overview of the malware that botnet C&Cs were associated with, but if you want the full botnet C&C picture download the detailed report here.

Mitigating the risk of malware at the DNS level

The increased threat from CoinMiners is apparent when you view the statistics from users of our DNS Firewall Threat Feeds. These threat feeds are consumed at the DNS level, allowing security teams to automatically block users (blocks/redirects), and IoT devices’ from accessing bad sites.

In April 2018 only 21% of blocks/redirects were for CoinMiner/Cryptoblocker traffic, whereas at the end of last year, in December 2018, CoinMiner redirects accounted for 66% of all blocked/redirected traffic.

It is evident that the botnet C&C landscape underwent some significant changes in 2018. With ‘lean teams’ and ‘lean budgets’ security professionals are caught between a rock and a hard place in attempting to keep on top of the ever-changing threats. Therefore, it’s crucial to identify solutions that are quick to install, ‘set & forget,’ and leverage the best threat intelligence in the industry. In doing so, security & IT teams are enabled to focus on other urgent matters, confident in the knowledge that teams of professional security researchers and investigators are identifying the threats on their behalf.