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Hunting for Botnet Command and Controls
Uky writes "Convinced that the recent upswing in virus and Trojan attacks is directly linked to the creation of botnets for nefarious purposes, a group of high-profile security researchers is fighting back, vigilante-style. The objective of the group, which operates on closed, invite-only mailing lists, is to pinpoint and ultimately disable the C&C (command-and-control) infrastructure that sends instructions to millions of zombie drone machines hijacked by malicious hackers." From the article: "Using data from IP flows passing through routers and reverse-engineering tools to peek under the hood of new Trojans, Thompson said the researchers are able to figure out how the botnet owner sends instructions to the compromised machines."
One time, an OpenBSD box of mine got own3d by some script kiddie and, as the box was unattended for months, was admitted as a node in some script kiddie IRC network. After some playing around and modifying the ircd placed on my server to make me unkickable, I made myself a global operator and fucked with their whole network. Stupid script-niggers.
I'm a Windows owner. I download stuff all the time. I disabled my antivirus. Windows is still trying to install critical updates from 2004.
I ran adaware once and it came up with 400 some hits. But really, who cares. As long as I don't notice a slow down on my machine, I don't give a shit who owns it or what they do with it.
If they cause me trouble, then I might be arsed to take action (like adware. Spywhere is ok, adware, not so much).
But it doesn't hurt anyone else much either as I'm on a 56k line. Oh, scary DOS comming from that.