Jul 5, 2018

Keep Your Office Safely Out of the Botnet

Online malware isn't hunting your company. It's not waiting in the bushes, waiting for the perfect moment to strike specifically at your network. It's relatively rare for malicious online actors to target your company and devote time to attack after attack on your servers and desktop systems alone.

Instead, it's much more realistic to picture your network like it's in a sea of sharks. No one shark is specifically coming for you. Instead, everything online is looking for easy prey, and you don't want to be it. The frenzy of malware sharks around is taking a snap at whatever swims by, and it never stops being hungry. That's why your company has to move quickly and protect itself from every type of shark possible. One of the growing newest threats in the frenzy is a zombified shark, or the botnet.

What's a botnet?

Bots are a type of malware that infects your device or network and then sit there quietly. Malicious actors wait until hundreds or thousands of devices are passively infected. This network, or a botnet, can then be harnessed to launch targeted attacks on a single powerful entity. One botnet took down GitHub and other major sites for hours in 2016. Other botnets have been used to launch smaller DDOS attacks. Because the bots infect devices but don't immediately engage in hostile or energy-intensive activity, they can be incredibly difficult to detect after the fact.

What do you need to do to protect your office?

Since bots are a form of malware, many premium programs will help shore up defenses against incoming threats. But botnets don't just harness smartphones, computers, and tablets. They can also form in the Internet of Things. The IoT, as a general rule, is completely unprotected from attacks. There are no firewalls protecting your coworkers exercising tracking armbands and there aren't anti-malware programs in the smart LEDs overhead. 

That makes the hundreds or thousands of unprotected IoT devices in your building easy prey for the botnet feeding frenzy. Go to folio1 to read about ways to keep bots and other threats out of your office.