Sometimes the disconnect between what we report and the view from the ground is disconcertingly great, for whatever reason, so here's another quick dig in the ribs for IT managers. Anti-malware specialist Sana Security – yeah I know there's a vested interest somewhere, but they also have pretty good visibility into what's going on – renewed warnings detailing the why today's bots are growing at such a rapid rate, perpetuating spam, and launching malware and denial of service attacks.

The firm's Tim Eades explained how rootkit capabilities have become more advanced, making the little critters harder to detect, and how most bots now don't need the traditional 'bot herder' to control them. Because they often operate on a kind of P2P model nowadays, he added, they can be maintained by each other, making traditional methods of tracking down the system admin and shutting it down pretty pointless. While appliances can do 80 percent of the job of protecting the enterprise, therefore, firms would do well to look at a signature based security agent on the client side, with some kind of sandboxing or behavioural heuristics technology in place. Eades also encouraged firms to work with their ISPs more, as they are in the best position to spot, track and mitigate attacks stealing bandwidth, processing speed and sensitive information from organisations.