In recent news the use of "botnets" has come to the light and now we are getting an interesting look at this big business that affects the media to benefit the few. Surprisingly many of these botnets originate from purchasing a kit, a famous one being the Zeus kit which starts off in its basic form for only a few thousand; pretty cheap for any company to utilize for their own benefits. Yet if the use of these kits is too complicated for the buyer to use they can instead buy the services of someone to do it for them and depending on where and how many you want to infect prices vary.
A senior security researcher at Webroot Mr Erasmus was quoted by BBC saying, "Setting up a botnet of 30,000 victims this way would cost about $5,000 to set up." This illustrates how easy and big a problem botnets really are. BBC also quoted a veteran botnet dismantler Tillmann Werner from Kaspersky Labs to saying; "They attacked some politically active sites in Russia. It's hard for me to imagine they were politically active themselves so they probably got paid for that." Once again the uses for Botnets are for whatever the buyer wants and this is a scary possibility because of how easy it is to use. Another interesting fact that can be found through the article from BBC is that the rising in spam. A weaker form of spyware, can be traced through a graph depicting rises depending on the major events going on in the world. An example is on the graph it can be seen that during the FIFA world cup there was a remarkably large amount of spam in the USA.
Along with the rise of the use of botnets there is also talk from other major companies and their move to disable them. One of the big companies spear heading this is Microsoft, who is currently aiming to disable the Zeus kit. They codenamed the Operation b71, and it plans to with the collaboration of financial services to "significantly disrupt" the illegal network. An issue has been brought up by security blogger Graham Cluley and he was quoted stating, "Sophos Labs hasn't seen any evidence of significant disruption to Zeus's activities through Microsoft's action." This has been proven by Sophos Labs, but a major issue that halts this operation b71 is the availability of these kits and how stopping one "bot" or a hacked computer doesn't interfere with the rest of the infected computers, making it a difficult challenge to end this threat.