Operating under the theory that if you kill the head, the body will follow, a group of high-profile security researchers is ramping up efforts to find and disable the command-and-control infrastructure that powers millions of zombie drone machines, or bots, hijacked by malicious hackers.

The idea is to open up a new reporting mechanism for ISPs and IT administrators to report botnet activity, especially the C&C (command-and-control) system that remotely sends instructions to botnets. A botnet, which is short for "robot network," is a collection of broadband-enabled computers that have been commandeered by hackers for use in spam runs, distributed denial-of-service attacks or malware installation.

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