What the Heck are Botnets?

What the Heck are Botnets?"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."Bonus Article:2006 Security Watch - What is this year going to have in store for us? There is a lot going on in the information security space. 2006 looks to be an interesting year in these regards. Below are some things to watch for in 2006, some of them are good and, unfortunately, some aren’t. First the good news:- We are getting a lot more serious about our security. This has a lot of reasons behind it. For example, new privacy laws are mandating organizations to tighten their security. Look to see more consumer privacy laws passed in the coming year and more tightening of security systems.- Authentication requirements are increasing. This is closing in large security holes. Corporations are requiring a great deal more of authentication to get into secure systems (this also is on the bad news side)- There is a plethora of sophisticated programs to help us be more secure and they will continue to get better. Competition right now is strong in the security industry sparking a lot of innovation.- ISPs are now taking on the responsibility to help us with our security. Take AOL's recent commercials as a good sign that others will follow the trend.Now the bad news:- Securing our networks is costing us. Most companies are globalizing their organizations and making them secure costs a lot of money. It will get worse before it gets better.- Authentication requirements are increasing. This is getting claustrophobic. Corporations are requiring a great deal more authentication to get into secure systems (This is also on the good news side) Unfortunately, for the end user, it is one more thing to be unhappy about, not unlike airport security lines.- Hackers are getting more sophisticated. For example, Botnets are becoming more complex and harder and harder to catch and stop. Do a search on botnets on the Internet. They really are causing a whole lot of problems, but it does not stop there. The number of viruses and malware out there is staggering.- Spammers keep finding more creative ways to fill our email boxes. Don't look for this trend to stop anytime soon.This article may be used any way you wish as long as youkeep this lower section in tact.About AuthorTR BrownLogo Registration Directoryhttp://logoreg.comCopyright 2006 3rdgen Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

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