Reading, UK – Astaro Corporation (http://www.astaro.com), a leading Unified Threat Management provider, advises against the underestimation of so called Botnets as they are not simply spreading for the sake of spreading, but serve malicious business interests. Botnets are based on similar principles like legitimate clouds, but have no limitations regarding reliability and can grow at amazing speed with no thought to failures. Astaro’s new free eBook explains how botnets work and the right steps to do after having detected infected machines within your own network.

Botnets pose a significant threat as they grow in popularity. Having countless machines on their own Internet connections frees the responsible parties from the risk to land in a lot of trouble. Since the source of the malicious behavior traces back to individual nodes instead of the actual operators of the botnet, this is an attractive way to make money without a lot of inherent risk.

To avoid damage for themselves and their customers, companies that discover an infection in their network tend to spend lots of money and time on extensive forensics trying to identify the individual(s) involved in the “breach”. As the business itself wasn’t truly targeted by an individual, but rather infected randomly as the botnet sought to spread, this is a waste of resources. To avoid being unknowingly involved in malicious actions and losing reputation, the better strategy is to invest in reviewing the security policy of the existing firewall or in better capabilities such as an Intrusion Protection System.

To learn more about where botnets come from, how they work and how they’ve created an underground economy for cybercriminals, download the free Astaro ebook “The Dark Side of Cloud Computing” here:

http://www.astaro.com/en-uk/resources/security-whitepapers-ebooks

For more information on botnets and other security insights visit the Astaro Security Perspectives blog at http://securityblog.astaro.com.