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Recruiting Friendly Botnets To Counter Bad Botnets

Posted by kdawson on from the was-an-old-lady-who-swallowed-a-fly dept.

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."

8 of 127 comments (clear)

  1. GTFO my torrents. by snarfies · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Ah yes. So now not only do Comcast and company want to throttle my torrents, but now these yahoos want to press my computer into their vigilante posse?

    Do these guys, possibly actually WORK for Comcast and are out looking for ways to make every ISP in the world, and possibly governments as well, ban torrents?

    1. Re:GTFO my torrents. by boris111 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Ha vigilante was the first thing that popped in my head. What happens when these vigilantes feel the power in their hands and they themselves turn evil? A legitimate question would be: couldn't a black hat reverse engineer this and use it against the white hats?

  2. Future of Botnets by pieterh · · Score: 3, Interesting

    First person to make a "good" BotNet where you can join and get protection for a low, low monthly subscription, makes a killing.

    BotNets are obviously the only way to fight BotNets.

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    My blog
  3. Re:Could we have something like Phalanx@Home? by poetmatt · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I've heard of this open network based on a whole bunch of computers interconnected....I believe it was called, last I checked, the internet?

  4. Re:I've always wondered... by witherstaff · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I remember one of my boxes was compromised in the 90s through a POP3 exploit. The kid patched the hole after he gave himself an ssh account. He poked around the pr0n site hosted on it, then sent me a talk request to tell me what he did. I miss the old days of polite crackers.

  5. Re:I've always wondered... by ArsonSmith · · Score: 2, Interesting

    White hats just use the basic social engineering technics of hacking. See Seti, RSA, etc...

    --
    Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
  6. Re:I've always wondered... by sm62704 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    What if my computer was a honeypot as part of a honeynet?

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    mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
  7. misused buzz word alert by BrunoUsesBBEdit · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It's not a botnet, but if they hadn't inappropriately used that buzz word, would we be talking about it?

    It's frustrating the way our terminology continues to get diluted to where everything becomes ambiguous because you must assume that the majority of the people out there don't know the meanings of the words.

    A good off topic example is "stereotype, bigotry, and racism" through related, these three are distinct but everything is now just rolled up into racism. This makes it difficult to express that a person holds the particularly nasty belief that a certain race is genetically inferior to others.

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    The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the