Gone are the days when a malware-infected system would display a silly image or corrupt itself just to annoy the user. Now we face bot armies that check in with their handlers for their next task, which could be a distributed denial-of-service attack against government systems or to capture and transmit sensitive data such as bank account information or encryption keys back to the bot owner. Cybercrime has become big business, and botnets are part of that business.

A group of appliance vendors, including Damballa, is rising to meet the challenge. Damballa's Failsafe appliance/software package aims to put bots out of business, or at least dent their capabilities. Tests showed Damballa's approach would be a good fit for large enterprises with other malware protections already in place, but it might not be the best bet for organizations that need to stretch the security budget or for those deploying anti-malware systems for the first time.

Founded in 2006 with technology developed at Georgia Tech, Damballa focuses on protecting businesses from targeted attacks. Utilizing software, global monitoring, and traffic analysis, Damballa claims its Failsafe appliance can detect malicious botnets within organizations even when those organizations have up-to-date antivirus and malware protections.

According to Damballa, 3% to 5% of enterprise network assets worldwide are infected with bot malware. By not relying on signatures like intrusion-detection and -prevention systems, Damballa claims it can detect and report on these and other zero-day malware through real-time traffic analysis.

The Failsafe v3.0 appliance is a custom-built server with four hot-swap hard drives, redundant power supplies, five network interfaces, and enough power to monitor at a minimum 10,000 nodes. The appliance is licensed per node, with a minimum purchase of 10,000 nodes priced at $100,000.

Installation is straightforward: The appliance uses a span port or network tap to see network traffic. Since the Failsafe appliance does not sit in-line, it's not a point of failure in your network architecture. VPN connectivity from the appliance to Damballa is required for remote support, upgrades, and uploading of malware samples. The server itself is a standard rack-mount unit.

Once connected and racked, setup is performed through a console-based menu system that offered no unpleasant surprises in tests. After setting our management IP address and configuring a host name and other associated network settings, we were ready to log in through the Web-based management console.

Once you log in to the Web-based console, you'll see just how straightforward -- and early stage -- Failsafe really is. You don't need to do much, and there isn't much for you to do: You can change some account information, look at reports, or read help documents, and that's about all. To lose its rookie status, the Failsafe appliance must offer staff more useful features, such as the ability to remotely remediate infected systems from the appliance or provide more in-depth reporting such as the ability to report on infections by user, not just system.