Botnet attacks will worsen in coming years, and better international...

and support, said ENISA. Standardizing the processes -- for incident reports, identified threats and evidence against suspected criminals -- and mechanisms for keeping shared information confidential and assuring its trustworthiness all play a key role, it said. Existing approaches to measuring the sizes of botnets are usually inaccurate, the agency said. Instead of a generic threat measurement for assessing botnets, ENISA proposed different ones based on diverse stakeholder perspectives. The diversity of EU and national cybercrime laws makes the fight against botnets less efficient, and the applicability of promising detection and mitigation approaches is being limited by conflicts between data protection and information technology security laws, it said. Working processes increase the reaction time to the extent that criminals can easily avoid detection, it said. Botnets’ spread and success are affected by several factors, among them the ease and cost of infecting someone’s PC with malware; the potential profit of running a botnet; and the probability and severity of criminal sanctions, it said. There are three high-level objectives for countering the threat, ENISA said. Existing botnets must be mitigated by giving the owners of compromised computers more support, beefing up identification and monitoring, and sharing information among responsible players. Cybercrime laws should be globally harmonized, it said. A second goal is to prevent new infections by raising public awareness and protecting systems better, the agency said. The third objective is to make botnets and cybercrime less financially attractive through better anti-fraud systems and tougher prosecutions, it said. ENISA recommended that regulators: (1) Intensify efforts to update national laws to deal with cybercrime. (2) Harmonize rules at the EU level to make mitigation and cooperation easier. (3) Create a closely-linked network of responsible parties across EU countries. End-users also play a role in protecting their systems against malware, ENISA said, and they should be made more aware of security issues and given easily available guidance. ISPs should have to notify customers about remotely-identified infections, as long as they're given appropriate incentives for bearing the costs, it said. The agency identified several future trends. Botnets will be increasingly economically and politically motivated, and the quality and simplicity of tools for attacks will continue to get better, it said. Emerging technologies will allow higher levels of deception and resilience via network protocols, Web standards and real-time communication schemes or social networks, it said. Because of the patchwork of cybercrime laws, even not very complex botnets will last for long periods, it said. As smart phones become more popular, botnets based on them and on other new ways of accessing the Internet will increase, it said. ENISA’s report will be presented Wednesday at a conference in Cologne, Germany.