"A botnet is
comparable to compulsory military service for windows boxes" -
Stromberg (http://project.honeynet.org/papers/bots/)
Botnets are networks of
computers that hackers have infected and grouped together under their
control to propagate viruses, send illegal spam, and carry out
attacks that cause web sites to crash.
What makes botnets
exceedingly bad is the difficulty in tracing them back to their
creators as well as the ever-increasing use of them in extortion
schemes. How are they used in extortion schemes? Imagine someone
sending you messages to either pay up or see your web site crash.
This scenario is starting to replay itself over and over again.
Botnets can consist of
thousands of compromised machines. With such a large network, botnets
can use Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) as a method to cause
mayhem and chaos. For example a small botnet with only 500 bots can
bring corporate web sites to there knees by using the combined
bandwidth of all the computers to overwhelm corporate systems and
thereby cause the web site to appear offline.
Jeremy Kirk, IDG NewsService on January 19, 2006, quotes Kevin Hogan, senior manager for
Symantec Security Response, in his article "Botnets shrinking in
size, harder to trace", Hogan says "extortion schemes have
emerged backed by the muscle of botnets, and hackers are also renting
the use of armadas of computers for illegal purposes through
advertisements on the Web."
One well-known technique
to combat botnets is a honeypot. Honeypots help discover how
attackers infiltrate systems. A Honeypot is essentially a set of
resources that one intends to be compromised in order to study how
the hackers break the system. Unpatched Windows 2000 or XP machines
make great honeypots given the ease with which one can take over such
systems.
A great site to read up on
this topic more is The Honeynet Project: (http://project.honeynet.org)
which, describes its own site's objective as "To learn the tools,
tactics and motives involved in computer and network attacks, and
share the lessons learned."
Bart D. Ebinger
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