Slashdot Mirror
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."
Yeah, just let the ISP's bring your site to its knees instead of the botnets.
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?
NO!
NO NO NO NO!
However you slice it, even if this "friendly" botnet is performing some beneficial task (such as kacking a bad botnet that's infected my machine), it's STILL bad!
It's accessing and carrying out tasks on my machine without my express permission.
HELL FUCKING NO!
This is NOT a "lesser of two evils" choice here. BOTH choices (malicious botnet or "beneficial" botnet) are evil, PERIOD!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
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?
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
The researchers are so ignorant of history. All the malware writers have to do is to create a Legion botnet. The Legion defeats a Phalanx every time.
At least watching this in action would be cooler than playing Rome: Total War.
can beat up your botnet
Uhm hyperventilating much? This is /. after all and we don't need to RTFA, but please at least cut down the unwarranted profanity. FTA:
/. summaries to form your opinion. *sigh*.
"Rather than using an ill-gotten botnet, Phalanx would use the large networks of computers which companies currently use to serve massive amounts of content," says team member Colin Dixon."
Flame where warranted, but please, please, don't rely on
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
Did you even read the summary?
It's not an offense, it's a defense. A protected server has all traffic routed to members of large cluster of helper machines (the "good botnet"). The protected server then contacts and collects the content as it is able. Instead of a DDOS attack being able to shovel data down on the target, the data is distributed to the cluster of helper machines. The recipient server then deals with the traffic at a pace it is able.
The article is short, but it kind of sounds like each node in the "good botnet" is serving as a sort of per-connection proxy to the destination server.
Maybe that clarifies things a bit?
They are NOT talking about "accessing and carrying out tasks on my machine without my express permission."
Heck, I do it for free.
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.
My blog
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.
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
aww reminds me of the days that if you tried to probe a bot server it tried to launch a DOS attack on you. had many hours of fun spoofing a nmap of a bot server's ip and watch the servers take each other out.. man i laughed for days watching bots attack each other.. aw the good-ol days.
Further reading: http://www.people.frisk-software.com/~bontchev/papers/goodvir.html
FreeBSD for the impatient.
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.
The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the