European Cyber-Security Research and Innovation

Around the beginning of the 21st century, something changed. Criminals started to see business opportunities from compromising and remotely controlling machines. Since then, opportunistic, organized and profit-driven attacks have been rising at an extraordinary pace. For the last 10–15 years the cyber criminals' goal has been to infect as many targets as possible in order to create new botnets or increase the power of those already in existence. More powerful botnets meant more profit, which came from stolen information (e.g., credentials, credit cards) or directly from renting out these attack-as-a-service infrastructures. Our analysis in Chapter 11 of the Red Book [2] shows that modern botnets are also extremely resilient, guaranteeing the cyber criminals long lasting supplies of offensive capabilities.