Cybercriminals today create and use botnets to perpetrate their criminal activities. Whether it is to send out Blackhole Exploit Kit spam or to use as entry points into organizations, the one constant is that most bots (victim computers) communicate back and forth with command and control (C&C) servers. Trend Micro’s Global Threat Intelligence, derived from our Smart Protection Network™, monitors C&C servers, infected Bots, and the malicious communication between the two regularly to ensure our customers are protected.
Today we’re publishing a new global map showing active C&C servers, highlighted by red dots, and bots (victim computers), highlighted by blue dots, to show you where these botnets are located in the world. If you are using the Chrome or Firefox browsers, you will see some of the dots radiate, showing any systems that are tied together (a unique botnet). All users can mouse over any of the servers to get a pop-up message that shows the server location, when it was first observed, most affected countries, and the total number of victims we’ve found associated with that server. Note that the blue dots represent more than one victim in most instances.
Trend Micro uses this global threat intelligence which we gather 24/7 to develop protections for our customers. The IP/Domain address of the C&C server is included in our Web/Domain/IP reputation databases to block access to these C&C servers. This may be in the form of blocking new malware being downloaded from the server or blocking an upload of stolen information from your computer to the C&C server. We download all malware samples from these C&C servers to add signatures and heuristic rules into our file reputation database to ensure our customers detect any of the files that could be downloaded as well. The network traffic is analyzed and added to our Deep Discovery solution to detect any communication from your systems to these C&C servers. Finally, by analyzing the information about the C&C servers (IP and domain registration data) we’re able to monitor other systems that may come online in the future.
Bookmark the map and check out all the other great information we have in the Security Intelligence section of our website and please include comments and suggestions for improvements we can make in the future to this map.
