Trend Micro turns tables on botnets

Security company Trend Micro has unveiled its InterCloud Security Service, in the US, which it claims can identify botnet activity and offer customers the ability to quarantine and clean bot-infected PCs.

InterCloud is designed to meet the requirements of ISPs, universities and other large network providers.

The service aims to address the mounting threat posed by botnets, the networks of compromised machines that can be controlled remotely by an attacker.

Threats associated with botnets include click-fraud, distributed denial-of-service attacks, spam, identity theft via phishing and pharming and other criminal activity.

Because bots are often specifically crafted to avoid the detection of pattern matching, Trend Micro's service relies on the use of a Behavioural Analysis Security Engine.

The technology analyses aggregated application and network infrastructure data, including DNS queries and Border Gateway Protocol routing tables, to detect aberrant botnet-related behaviour.

"Up to this point, ISPs have been largely at the mercy of botnet activity, robbing them of network resources and threatening the welfare of consumers and businesses," said Dave Rand, chief technology officer for internet content security at Trend Micro.

"With the release of this service, and the bot-expert resources devoted to it, Trend Micro offers service providers and large institutions the first botnet mitigation solution from a trusted name in security."