News: eFileCabinet Signs Colocation Deal with C7 Data Centers
News: Web Hosting Sales and Promos - March 12 2010
News: Horizon Leases Space at Power Loft Data Center
FireEye Sets Anti-Botnet StrategyBy Justin Lee, theWHIR.com
October 2, 2007 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- As cyber crimes plague the IT industry, malicious threats have evolved from the simpler worms of recent years to the more sophisticated, harder to battle botnets.
Botnets are operated via remotely controlled and compromised PCs, often to exploit spam and conduct denial of service attacks for profit. Unlike worms, botnets are not randomly targeted. They remain invisible to many antivirus solutions and are a key feature in stolen identities and privacy breaches, corporate IP theft, network downtime, loss of productivity and inflating operational expenses.
Anti-botnet system provider FireEye (fireeye.com) is working to address the growing epidemic of botnet attacks by enhancing its product capabilities using some of the same principles used in building the botnets themselves. The company recently announced a new strategic blueprint for protecting consumers, service providers and corporate networks against botnet-driven attacks.
"The new strategy is [a] completely from-the-ground-up approach to detecting malicious activity, identifying botnet propagation, command and control coordinates, out of those malicious flows and networking that information across multiple devices deployed by an ISP and corporate environment in real time," says Ashar Aziz, CEO of FireEye. "By creating an anti-botnet we're creating a network of devices put together to combat the botnet itself.
The solution includes a line of appliances called Botwall 4000 that enable Internet service providers to block botnets and stealthy malware from exploiting enterprise data and computing resources.
Botwall appliances feature the FireEye analysis and control technology engine which scours network traffic for botnet malware and botnet command and control server communications within virtual victim machines.
The devices work with the FireEye Botwall Network, a globally deployed, "in the cloud" service that integrates global intelligence with local botnet analysis.
"The Botwall Network is comprised of our appliances sitting in the ISP environment as well as in the corporate environment," says Aziz. "Other vendors will try to do some manual, global signature detection and force and apply that on the corporate network. What we do on the corporate network is local analysis."
The network catalogs and disseminates botnet characteristics taken from analyses conducted by interconnected networks of Botwall appliances deployed at service providers around the world. Customers using the product can subscribe to the Botwall Network to access the constantly updating information.
FireEye says its anti-bot network solution enables ISPs to prevent identity theft infrastructure, shut down spam relays and restore the bandwidth subscribers have paid for.
"Our devices are not intended to be visible," says Aziz. "They're actually silent observers of malicious activity, and therein lies the power of what we do. We are effectively invisibly monitoring all this malicious activity that gives us a layer of security over and above other people who try to create Internet-scale observation systems."
Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
Comment anonymously or log into your WHIR account
Logging in allows enhanced commenting features (such as external linking) in news, features, blogs and more.