WASHINGTON – A top-level FBI official testified before a Senate subcommittee on July 15th on the agencies’ efforts to disrupt and dismantle botnets, otherwise known as “robot networks” which can infiltrate anyone’s computer with internet access after “one wrong click”.
FBI Assistant Director Joseph Demarest testified on cyber criminal threats and the FBI’s progress on campaigns to disrupt and disable significant botnets. Demarest, who said that the use of botnets is on the rise, explained that they can be used in organized criminal activity, for covert intelligence collection, to attack Internet-connected critical infrastructure, and as weapons in ideology campaigns to instigate fear, intimidation, or public embarrassment.
Demarest highlighted the Bureau’s Operation Clean Slate, an aggressive approach to disrupt and dismantle the most significant botnets threatening the U.S. economy and our national security by targeting the criminal coders who create them. This initiative, according to Demarest, incorporates various entities, including the FBI and our federal partners, international partners, major Internet service providers, the U.S. financial sector, and other private sector cyber stakeholders. He also discussed several recent successes in combating the botnet threat, including actions taken against the Citadel botnet—responsible for the loss of more than a half-billion dollars—and the GameOver Zeus botnet—believed to be responsible for millions of dollars of losses.
“We face cyber threats from state-sponsored hackers, hackers for hire, organized cyber syndicates, and terrorists,” Demarest told Congressmen. “They seek our state secrets, our trade secrets, our technology, and our ideas—things of incredible value to all of us. They may seek to strike our critical infrastructure and our economy. The threat is so dire that cyber security has topped the Director of National Intelligence list of global threats for the second consecutive year.
“Our personal computers can become part of a botnet—it only takes one wrong click for a home user to download malicious code.”
Industry experts estimate that botnet attacks have resulted in the overall loss of millions of dollars from financial institutions and other major U.S. businesses. They’ve also affected universities, hospitals, defense contractors, law enforcement, and all levels of government.
A bot, or web robot, is an automated malware program that scans blocks of network addresses and infects vulnerable computers. A network of these infected computers—numbering in the hundreds of thousands or even millions—is called a botnet (robot network), and each computer becomes connected to a command-and-control server operated by the criminal.
Once the botnet is in place, it can be used in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, proxy and spam services, malware distribution, and other organized criminal activity. Botnets can also be used for covert intelligence collection, and terrorists or state-sponsored actors could use a botnet to attack Internet-based critical infrastructure.
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