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

Botmasters will switch to distributed C&C

[putko]

Botmasters will switch to gossip-based protocols (like p2p) to achieve their goals. The good ones have done this already.

This is required for other reasons: if you have more than 10K or so bots, you are better off with a distributed mechanism.

Interestingly enough, most of the botmasters are not so technical - they wouldn't be able to comprehend virtual synchrony if it smacked them in the face.

I've done something similar

[c6gunner]

Formating the guy's HD might be a little extreme, but back when I actually used IRC, I used to get bots trying to infect me all the time. So I'd run the file, capture and analyze the packets it sends as it's connecting, then shut it down, reconnect using mIRC, and take over the botnet. From there it was a simple matter to get them to accept a script which would eradicate all the bots.

They're getting more complex these days, but the same principles still apply. Once you get one on your system, it's a simple matter to analyze it and use it to take control off, and destroy, the rest of them.

Unusual, but Not Impossible

[Quantam]

A few months ago, Taylor became obsessed with tracking a rather unusual botnet consisting of computers running Mac OS X and Linux operating systems.

As that means that there a large numbers of breachable OS X and Linux machines out there, that pretty much puts to death the myth that OS X and Linux are sufficiently secure out of the box.