As legislators try to address cybersecurity threats through various bills, the White House yesterday promoted a voluntary set of principles developed by the Industry Botnet Group (IBG) to help reduce botnets. The White House event was held to discuss the risk botnets pose to Internet security.
In January, IBG was formed as a multi-industry organization to collaborate and encourage efforts to reduce the effectiveness of botnets. Bots are malicious programs installed on a users’ system, usually without their knowledge, that are used by criminals to steal personal identity information, send spam, launch attacks against Web sites and other malicious activities.
“Bots are a serious concern for end-users, the economy and the nation,” Michael O’Reirdan, M3AAWG co-chairman for malware, recently stated. “Looking at the significant reduction in spam over the years, we know that cooperative industry action is effective against online abuse.” M3AAWG serves on the IBG steering committee.
The new principles are intended to significantly improve cooperation among network operators, vendors, trade associations and other nonprofits working against the malware. At today’s event, everyone in the Internet ecosystem was encouraged to implement the Principles for Voluntary Efforts to Reduce the Impact of Botnets in Cyberspace. The principles include:
- Share cyber responsibilities by employing reasonable technologies to thwart the effectiveness of botnets across all phases of the mitigation lifecycle: prevention, detection, notification, remediation, and recovery;
- Coordinate across sectors in order to better analyze, prevent, and combat threats;
- Confront the problem globally through cross-border collaboration;
- Report lessons learned with partners in the Internet ecosystem;
- Educate users by making information and resources available to them;
- Preserve flexibility for responses by different entities to an ever-evolving threat environment;
- Promote innovation to foster technological advances;
- Respect privacy; and
- Navigate the complex legal environment.
“It takes a global village, with all the suppliers involved, to fight bots,” believes O’Reirdan. “The only way to effectively protect consumers is for the operators, vendors and other participants serving the Internet ecosystem to recognize their shared responsibility in addressing the problem and then integrate the appropriate defenses into their daily business practices. The IBG principals encourage the industry to be assertive and acknowledge the problem, cooperate, coordinate and be flexible in their responses.”
While not a new approach to the botnet battle (other calls for collaboration and joint-industry efforts have been done) IBG’s public-private partnership strategy underscores the need for experts from a variety of disciplines to work collaboratively together to address today’s ever-increasingly complex cyber threats.