One interesting comment on my previous post on Botnets, gave me a cue for another consideration concerning the role of the cloud inside the fight against botnets.
The fact that ISPs are evaluating an Anti Botnet Conduct Code means their are feeling responsible for what resides inside (and leaves) their networks, and hence are supposed to take technical, organizational and educational countermeasures.
Anyway, in order to be effective, anti-bot controls should be enforced inside the customers’ networks, or at least before any source NAT is performed, otherwise IP addresses of the infected machines would be hidden, making impossible to detect and block them directly. A huge task for an ISP unless one were able to centralize the security enforcement point where the traffic is monitored and compromised endpoints members of a bot detected.
Said in few words I believe that ISPs will soon offer advanced anti-malware (read anti-bot) services in the cloud by routing (or better switching) the customer’s traffic on their data centers where it is checked and the customers notifyed in real time about the presence of bots inside their networks. You may think to the same approach used for URL filtering services on the cloud with the difference that in this scenario the clients should arrive to the ISP’s Data Center with their original IP Address or a statically NATed address so that it could always be possible to recognize the original source. Another difference is also that in this scenario the purpose in not only to protect the customers’ networks from the external world but also (and maybe most of all) to protect the external world from the customers’ (dirty) networks.
Another contribution of the cloud against Botnets that I forgot to mention in the original post.
Related articles
- I, BOT (Coming To A C&C Server Near You) (hackmageddon.com)
