Botnets March On

Online bookmakers who become victims of online extortion attacks more often than not pay up, according to an IBM security researcher. Martin Overton of IBM Global Services said those at the receiving end of denial of service attacks also often fail to report assaults to police despite improved policy procedures to guard the anonymity of victims in the UK and elsewhere.

Common and widespread bot families include SDbot, Agobot, Spybot, Polybot and Mytob. Upwards of 12,800 variants of SDbot have been created, a figure which has doubled in the last six months.  – The Register