IT organizations have been subjected to a number of security plagues, but few of them have the potential for wide-spread havoc of the botnet, a category of threat that has raised the risk of coordinated, distributed attack to a new level. In this paper, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) takes a look at how the botnet threat became so serious, how botnet defense must answer the challenge, and how FireEye introduces a new approach to anti-botnet protection that more fully recognizes their comprehensive nature and scope. Executives will gain a new appreciation for the true scale of the botnet threat, and how today's emerging solutions must answer the threat with a similar level of multi-faceted defense.