Call for Volunteers:  Antibot Working Group Seeks Experts to Help Develop Botnet Essential Practices Guide for Cloud Providers

By J.R. Santos, Global Research Director

Today at the CSA Congress 2014, we have announced a call for volunteers to help create the first CSA Botnet Essential Practices Guide for Cloud Providers. Botnets have long been a favored attack mechanism of malicious actors, with server-based bot activity increasing as a means of taking advantage of vastly greater upload bandwidths and higher compute performance. With cloud computing rapidly becoming the primary option for server-based computing and hosted IT infrastructure, the CSA Anti-Bot Working Group was established in 2013 to help articulate solutions to prevent, respond to and mitigate damage from botnets occurring on cloud infrastructure.

Cloud providers have historically been viewed as one of the sources leveraged for botnet activity that has impacted outside businesses. Cloud providers can benefit from implementing a standard framework of best practices to protect their infrastructure from potential disruption associated with botnet malware, both in terms of resource usage as well as consumer perception.

The guide, currently underway, includes a series of recommended approaches to minimizing the impact of compromised systems within the cloud infrastructure from affecting co-located customers and external entities. This guidance will be important in enabling cloud providers to take a comprehensive lifecycle approach to botnet prevention, and avoid being used as an instrument of malice to other organizations or entities.

To volunteer, fill out the following online form: https://cloudsecurityalliance.org/research/anti-bot/basecamp/

After you fill out this form, someone from our Research Team will contact you with next steps.