PandaLabs recently released its report that revealed that two kinds of Trojans are to be blamed for the control of the majority of botnets globally. The report says that the Sdbot and Gaobot malware groups had been accountable for 80% of findings associated to bots through the Q1 of 2007, while other offenders such as Oscarbot, IRCbot or Rxbot were to be blamed for a much slighter level
Bots are automated worms or Trojans, which deploys themselves on PCs to execute some actions automatically, for example distributing spam and converting the exploited PCs into zombies. Botnets, or networks comprised of PCs ridden with bots, have turned out to be a money-spinning business model.
Luis Corrons, technical director of PandaLabs, was quoted as saying,
This dominance is not so much due to any special features of Gaobot or Sdbot, but simply because their code is much more widely available on the Internet. This means that any criminals that want to make a bot can simply base it on the source code of these threats, making any modifications they choose. Essentially, this saves them a lot of work.
In 2006, bots comprised 13% of all latest threats spotted by PandaLabs. Of those, 74% had been connected to the Sdbot and Gaobot families. Up till now, the majority of them were bridled by means of IRC servers, which enabled hackers to send orders whilst veiling behind the inscrutability of chat servers, but, now there are bots that are able to be br-dled during web consoles via HTTP.
