Marshal8e6 Warns of Dangers Highlighted by BBC Click Botnet

LONDON, UK – 13 March, 2009 - Marshal8e6, the global provider of Web and email security technology, is alerting businesses to ensure that their Web and email filtering technology is up to date, in the wake of a BBC experiment highlighting the ease of falling prey to botnets.

In the BBC Click experiment, to be aired at 11.30am on Saturday 14th March, presenter Spencer Kelly will demonstrate how easy it is to set up a spamming botnet. The investigation involved the BBC purchasing a zombie network of 22,000 compromised PCs through an internet chat room. Two virgin email accounts were set up on two PCs to test how long it took for the botnet to populate the inboxes with BBC Click spam. Within minutes of Kelly pressing the send button, both email accounts were flooded with spam messages bearing different headers, but the same message, “You’ve been Clicked”.

Following the Click investigation, the BBC contacted all 22,000 PC users to alert them to the fact that their email security had been compromised and to urge them to update their antivirus protection. The BBC did not state whether the compromised PCs were home users or businesses using out of date antivirus protection.

“The key thing is that none of these 22,000 PC owners were aware that their machines were being used for this purpose and therefore they were at risk of being used for much more malicious botnet activity such as a denial of service or phishing attack,” comments Nick Hawkins, VP Sales EMEA, Marshal8e6. “People still think that their PC will only be infected if they visit a ‘dodgy’ website. In fact our Threat Research and Content Engineering labs have found that there is a massive increase in blended attacks and in legitimate websites being used to host botnet malware. Even if your antivirus is in place, brand new malware examples are being released onto the Web every day. To compound the problem, malware is designed to morph on a regular basis to evade signature filters. For organisations that rely on email and Web, the best protection against these blended threats is to implement technologies that can scan the content of emails and websites in real time, without adding latency.”

About Marshal8e6
Marshal8e6 is a global provider of web and email security products. We are the only security company able to provide integrated, reliable and effective enterprise-class multi-layered solutions. Our deep expertise in web and email allows us to correlate real-time threat intelligence to protect organizations from current and emerging threats.

With 20,000 customers and 16 million end users in 96 countries, the company is privately held and based in Orange, California with international headquarters in London and offices worldwide. For more information about Marshal8e6, please visit http://www.marshal8e6.com.  

Marshal8e6 Threat Research and Content Engineering lab (TRACE) researches spam, phishing, Web exploits and malware. It is also responsible for the anti-malware defence and updates for Marshal8e6’s suite of content security solutions, including MailMarshal SpamCensor, and Zero Day updates.   Data and analysis from TRACE is continually updated and accessible online at http://www.marshal.com/trace.

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