Recruiting Friendly Botnets To Counter Bad Botnets

holy_calamity writes "New Scientist reports on a University of Washington project aiming to marshal swarms of 'good' computers to take on botnets. Their approach — called Phalanx — uses its distributed network to shield a server from DDoS attacks. Instead of that server being accessed directly, all information must pass through the swarm of 'mailbox' computers, which are swapped around randomly and only pass on information to the shielded server when it requests it. Initially the researchers propose using the servers in networks such as Akamai as mailboxes; ultimately they would like to piggyback the good-botnet functionality onto BitTorrent."

Comments

I've always wondered...

[neokushan]

I've always wondered why botnets always seemed to be created by black hats. I think it'd be cool to have a competition where some whitehats try to exploit a vulnerability in some software in order to patch it FROM that vulnerability.
Even if it just forced a windows update, it'd still be quite useful, but it seems nobody with the skills to pull off such a feat can be bothered to do it.
Surely there's some benign genius out there who could exploit an existing botnet to send it a shutdown command, rather akin to how captain Picard defeated the Borg after he was captured by them, once again proving that Star Trek has given us great insight into the future and, of course, that Picard is better than Kirk will ever be?

Re:I've always wondered...

[CogDissident]

Because, a white hat could do it for free, and it'd be cool, but they'd risk being sued into a smoking crater if they told anyone.

By contrast, a black hat, stands to make thousands and thousands of dollars by just exploiting that vulnerability.

Which would you choose? Honestly?

Re:I've always wondered...

[sm62704]

Not to mention that using someone's computer without their permission is unethical. Black hats don't have to bother with ethics or morals.

GP: Even if it just forced a windows update

The first Windows update after I installed XP hosed my network drivers. If I hadn't given permission for that update I'd have seen a lawyer about the matter.

If you don't have permission to be in a computer STAY THE HELL OUT OF IT. It's unethical, it's illegal, and it's BAD MANNERS.

Could we have something like Phalanx@Home?

[vivin]

Like Seti@Home or Folding@home? We could have people sign up and join the Phalanx network. Or create a similar "open" network? People could then sign up for the service. I guess you could make it to where when you sign up, your computer becomes part of the network, and is also protected by the network. I don't know how feasible this is... just throwing out ideas.