Where are the ISPs in the battle against botnets?
They are the front lines of the botnet battle, but where are the ISPs? ISPs traditionally haven’t been the first lifeline you think of for tracing and killing these global networks of zombies that spew spam and malware around the Internet. (See Big, Fat Bot-Ache and Botnets Don Invisibility Cloaks.) ISPs today just don t have the resources in place to fight the good fight. And the financial incentive may not be there just yet, either, experts say. “I don’t think the botnet problem is large enough in the U.S. to catch ISPs’ attention here yet,” says David Maynor, CTO of Errata Security. “It will have to start costing them a lot of money first.” (See Errata Debuts Security Services.) But there are some ISPs that are proactive and engaged in the battle. Earthlink, for instance, works with its users in a so-called “feedback loop system” where users click on a “this is spam” button, so that helps Earthlink update its filters. This approach now blocks anywhere from 20,000 to 35,000 new zombi
