ITBusinesEdge.Com:  The intense concern — some would call it fear — engendered by botnets in general and the Storm botnet in particular is giving rise to a security sector expressly aimed at this threat.

Botnets are armies of computers that are taken over by criminals called bot herders. They are used to do a number of things, none of which are good. Botnets are insidious precisely because they don’t do any one thing. Instead, they control huge groups of Hessian computer troops that distribute viruses, send spam, launch denial-of-service attacks and recruit new members, among other things.

Botnet capacity can be leased and rented to customers, who often are in organized crime. This Internet cancer spreads rapidly. Fear grows because nobody knows precisely how bad the problem is. On top of all this, botnets are becoming increasingly sophisticated.

This makes the news that companies are springing up to confront the problem welcome. InfoWorld looks at two of them, FireEye and Damballa. Whether such companies remain independent or are acquired by established multipurpose vendors such as Symantec and McAfee remains to be seen. A third option is that anti-botnet software will become part of network-access control devices that serve as gatekeepers to end-point devices asking for network access. Indeed, there is no reason that all three paths may not be taken.

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