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

Future of Botnets

[pieterh]

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.

Re:I've always wondered...

[witherstaff]

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.

misused buzz word alert

[BrunoUsesBBEdit]

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.