Slashdot Mirror
FBI Releases Results of Operation Bot Roast
coondoggie writes to tell us that the FBI has released the findings of their recent botnet study and have identified over 1 million botnet crime victims. "The FBI is working with industry partners, including the Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University, to notify the victim owners of the computers. Microsoft and the Botnet Task Force have also helped out the FBI. Through this process the FBI may uncover additional incidents in which botnets have been used to facilitate other criminal activity, the FBI said in a statement.Bots are widely recognized as one of the top scourges of the industry. Gartner predicts that by year-end 75% of enterprises 'will be infected with undetected, financially motivated, targeted malware that evaded traditional perimeter and host defenses.'"
There would be an RFC for getting an email address for an ip address and it wouldn't take an expert to figure out how to contact the right person when you see a machine doing something it shouldn't.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Wrong, wrong, and wrong. Get your blind hatred out of the way for a second, and you might realize that there are more than just windows boxes hooked up to the tubes.
All the windows boxes dissapear, so the bot-lovers would start targeting linux and OSX.
Don't think that just because there isn't a very active threat against those platforms doesn't mean that one isn't possible.
Living With a Nerd
...that OS/2 would be the dominant operating system by, IIRC, 1993 or thereabouts.
I just did some Googling on things like "bad Gartner predictions" and "missed Gartner predictions" or '"Gartner predictions" scorecard' hoping that someone had tried to keep tabs on them, but found to my disappointment virtually no relevant hits. Everyone discusses them in the months after they're released, nobody seems to check back even as recently as a year.
Of course, with predictions like these for 2002... "During 2002, leading-edge businesses will exploit application integration to generate business innovation...." how the heck would anyone ever figure out whether or not it was fulfilled?
I can't believe people pay Gartner for this stuff.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
A. Everyone "knows" that the NSA is doing its utmost to listen to all internet traffic.
B. It would do the NSA no good to listen to everything without filtering out the 99.999% which is irrelevant. Ergo, they must have pattern filters.
C. Botnets must be a big part of the filtered traffic.
D. NSA must be aware of botnets, their patterns, their control channels, their zombie elements.
E. Yet botnets continue.
F. The NSA must want them to continue unmolested.
The NSA knows how botnets work, and could hijack them at any time. The only reason to do so is to keep them in reserve for their own use.
I suggest the NSA would hijack botnets for counterattack if the US nets were attacked by another country.
That's my conspiracy theory, I hope you like it.
Infuriate left and right
Then a few months back I get word from my credit card company that someone had hacked into my account online (using my username and password), changed my billing address to someplace in NJ, then proceeded to try to charge a bunch of stuff on the account (luckily the CC company caught on to them and locked it down). I couldn't figure out how they did it.
Then a few months after that, I started to notice my computer acting strange. My router would be showing HEAVY activity even when I wasn't doing anything and Windows wasn't downloading updates. Eventually, I realized that someone must had botted my computer (still don't know exactly what they were up to, but I'm sure it involved sending out letters from an innocent Nigerian official just wanting people to help him transfer some money). That's how they got my account info for my credit card.
Anyway. I wiped the whole system clean (even tried out Linux for a while, but didn't care for it) and now the problem is gone. But it still makes me nervous as Hell. What drives me crazy is that I can't figure out how they did it. But, as a hacker friend once said: If it's on a network, it can be hacked--period.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Having scanned through the entries in this topic, I see it has moved on from the tired old "bash Microsoft" and "extol Linux" rot. Then there are a few suggestions about how to track botnets and shut them down. The FBI 1 million infections number has been quoted as a US-centric benchmark.
A few months back a botnet herder in Europe went down for running ONE 1.5 million seated botnet. The global botnet infection numbers are therefore in the tens to hundreds of millions of infected machines. Forget about what platform they run on. Obviously the numerical majority of infections will always be on the OS that has the most prevalence. And it will never be the same percentage for higher use as lower use OS. That's because higher use attracts a much higher level of interest by the infection writers. So let's climb down off the hackneyed hobby-horses.
Now to come to the point - shutting down botnets.
Does anyone imagine for one moment that none of the millions of infected machines are sitting under the watchful eyes of law enforcement, botnet tracking operations, and university labs? Who do you think first knows (after the perpetrator) when a spam-bot turns into a DDOS bot? Who thinks that nobody is watching and tracking the CC&C IRC commands coming down to the watched bots?
Catch up with reality. The FBI is working on very specific intelligence from some very intelligent researchers.