14 DAY TRIAL // Botnets are a serious threat to Internet Service Providers and not only to them. As this is the year of the bot in cyber-security, it's a clear thing that all security experts are trying to tackle this problem. And what the botnet creators or herders or whatever you wish to call them fear most is, of course, their botnet being taken down. So, they thought of a devious way of keeping their botnets up even if they do get detected and the good guys try to take them down.
Bad guys on the web always learn one from another, and botnets creators have learned a precious thing from torrent pirates. If you've ever downloaded a file via torrents you've noticed that you actually receive a lot of small archives, that you can unpack and make them form the large file that you were after in the first place. This helps a lot in downloading files as fast as possible. And now, regarding botnets - the people that are taking care of them have decided to split the botnets into smaller ones. Thus, if a single attack could take down a botnet of, say 100.000, by splitting it into 100 smaller ones, it would need 100 attacks to take it down.
As you might already know, the majority of botnets is controlled via internet relay chat - this has already been pointed out by security expert Mika Stahlberg of F-Secure. You can imagine that taking down one IRC server would take down the whole botnet, that's why the bad guys are being cautious, and are not putting all their eggs in the same basket, to quote the same expert. So, they're getting harder and harder to take down, but employing this tactic also makes them lose some computing power.
In case, you've been reading this article and want to find out more about botnets, check out this link.