I’ve grown fascinated over the years with various efforts by Internet service providers to crack down on the menace from botnets, large groupings of hacked PCs that computer criminals remotely control for a variety of purposes, from spamming to hosting malicious software and attacking others online. Indeed, the botnet problem has become such a global menace that entire countries are now developing anti-botnet programs in collaboration with domestic ISPs.
One of the more unique and long-running examples of this is Japan’s “Cyber Clean Center,” (referred to hereafter as CCC) a little-known effort by the Japanese Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center (JP-CERT) and a collection of 76 Japanese ISPs covering 90 percent of the nation’s Internet users.
Participating ISPs that have customers with botted PCs may send those users an e-mail — and in some cases a letter via postal mail — instructing them to visit the CCC’s Web site, and download and run a cleanup tool developed by the JP-CERT in coordination with Trend Micro, the dominant anti-virus and computer security firm in Japan.
Relatively few of the thousands of U.S.-based ISPs have such programs in place, or if they do then not many have been willing to discuss them publicly. Some notable exceptions are Cox, Comcast (which is rolling out a trial bot infection notification system), and Qwest (if I missed any other biggies, readers please set me straight).
It’s unfortunate that such programs aren’t more widely emulated, because a majority of the world’s bot problem begins and ends here in the United States. According to a recent report (.pdf) by McAfee, the United States is home to the second largest pool of botted PCs — 2nd only to China — and is the world’s biggest exporter of junk e-mail.