A Survey on Financial Botnets Threat

Botnets, although technically based on long lasting well established attacking models, currently represent an increasing threat, moving huge amounts of capitals from legal system to criminals. This is mainly due to its adaptability, based on Crime-as-a-Service model, where different, transnational, actors are located in the different rings of the crime supply chain. Moreover, botnet success has been enabled by two main factors: the weak countermeasures adoption, reinforced by the well-known dominance of software attacker versus defender and the revenue model, which considers the target of the attack out of the victim (ICT users) control. Finally, the losses are typically in charge of silent financial/insurance organizations. These botnet pillars are available for renting at low-cost by criminal organizations, exploiting the dark side of the success factor of the Internet business players, the network externality, where targets, e.g. Internet two sided markets, can be easily predicted but not yet adequately protected. In this paper, the authors will describe, by Zeus and other botnet examples, the revenue model and its related costs as cybercrime, focusing on the concerning evolution of this threat and proposing some strategies to cope with it.