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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."

6 of 127 comments (clear)

  1. Throttled by zedlander · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  2. I've always wondered... by neokushan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:I've always wondered... by CogDissident · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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?

    2. 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.

  3. Re:What kind of mental cripple thinks this shit up by zedlander · · Score: 5, Informative
    From TFA:

    Their system, called Phalanx, uses its own large network of computers
    Chill the flip out, man. They're not taking over your computer.
  4. awwww by umbl3r · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.