White House launches anti-botnet campaign

May 30, 2012 | By David Perera

The financial services industry will pilot an anti-botnet information sharing effort later this year as part of an Obama administration-led cybersecurity effort announced May 30 by the White House and the Commerce Department.

The pilot, to be led by the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, could become the template for a wider botnet information sharing effort, administration officials said. The announcements came as part of a media campaign that included the unveiling of a voluntary set of principles for combating botnets adopted by the Industry Botnet Group, an industry group of trade associations and non-profits.

A September 2011 federal request for information regarding an anti-botnet voluntary code of conduct led to formation of the group.

Part of today's announcement is also that the FBI and the Secret Service have increased information sharing with the private sector. Administration officials said shutting down the Coreflood botnet in 2011 was due to increased cooperation.

Much of what was announced today is not new, an administration official acknowledged, "but the fact that we're working collectively is the focus of what we've done today," he said.

The FS-ISAC pilot could draw on an extension of the Internet Engineering Task Force standard IODEF developed with the Anti-Phishing Working Group as a means of passing along data about botnet-infected computers.

"There are ways to be sure that no more information than would be shared regularly" would be transmitted under the auspices of a botnet information sharing program, another administration official said.

For more:
- read a May 30 Commerce Department press release about anti-botnet efforts
- go to the Industry Botnet Group's statement of principles