Meet the Botnet Hunters

An anonymous reader writes "The Washington Post is running a pretty decent story about 'Shadowserver,' one of a growing number of volunteer groups dedicated to infiltrating and disabling botnets. The story covers not only how these guys do their work but the pitfalls of bothunting as well. From the article: 'Even after the Shadowserver crew has convinced an ISP to shut down a botmaster's command-and-control channel, most of the bots will remain infected. Like lost sheep without a shepherd, the drones will continually try to reconnect to the hacker's control server, unaware that it no longer exists. In some cases, Albright said, a botmaster who has been cut off from his command-and-control center will simply wait a few days or weeks, then re-register the domain and reclaim stranded bots.'"

Comments

Danger, Will Robinson

[Mr. Funky]

Nice until they run into a mobster-botmaster with a gun.
This is a task for the government, not for pimpled nerds.
Just my 2c...

Re:delete themselves

[Tweekster]

and I again say: WHO CARES? cross the line for a moral good. Just dont get caught and try not to cause anymore damage than the botnet host has already suffered.

Re:A different approach

[rob_squared]

For the simple reason that the user will just go somewhere else that will allow them to use the computer without added work. Users just don't see being part of a botnet a problem as long as it isn't slowing down their computer. And if it is, "its time to upgrade!" Unless there are legal penalties for not blocking bots, nobody is going to sacrifice their userbase so that they look like "smart guys" or "good guys" in the eyes of those in the know.