ISPs start to clear up consumer botnets themselves

Here is some good news - the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) has published guidelines and best practices for mitigating large-scale botnet infections on residential Internet networks.

The timing of this publication couldn’t be better - just after Twitter and a number of other social networking sites were effectively downed for several hours by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on one individual blogger.

Regardless of the motives behind this DDoS attack last week, the fact remains that one or more botnets were quite likely at the heart of the attack.

MAAWG's guidelines for ISPs show signs of being adopted by ISPs with residential customers across many regions. This is indeed excellent news, as it balances between the needs of many against the privacy of a few.

ISPs have been criticized for distancing themselves from the botnet problem, since they need to protect the privacy amongst their Internet users, especially private citizens.

The guidelines and best practices give the ISPs the ammunition they need to protect their networks - and the wider Internet community - against the growing problem of botnets.

Earlier this year, we uncovered a botnet of 1.9 million infected users' PCs - one of the largest ever seen.

We believe that if ISPs could have taken action against this botnet under the MAAWG guidelines, its size could have been significantly smaller.