PC Security: What the
Heck are Botnets?
by Ainuddin Mohamad
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...
"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 News
Service 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."
About the Author
Ainuddin Mohamad is the Webmaster of
http://www.BestWebsites.com.my which is a Directory of Best Websites. Since
July 2000
BestWebsites.com.my has featured thousands of best websites in many
categories of interest with descriptions/reviews given by leading publications
and webmasters.
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