Earlier this month, Brett Wentworth took Level 3 Communications Inc. into territory that most rivals have been reluctant to enter. The director of global security at the largest carrier of Internet traffic cut off data from reaching a group of servers in China that his company believed was involved in an active hacking attack.
The Broomfield, Colo., company handles roughly 40% of internet traffic and is taking an aggressive—and some say risky approach—to battling criminal activity. Risky because hackers often hijack legitimate machines to do their dirty work, raising the risk of collateral damage by sidelining a business using the same group of servers. Such tactics also run against a widely held belief that large carriers should be facilitating traffic, not halting it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 02 2015, @05:11PM
Network security researchers usually investigate botnets based on which server they talk to. The fact that your bots keep talking to hosts acting like Minecraft servers will be picked up quickly for anything but the tiniest botnet.