Sandia Studies Botnets In 1M OS Digital Petri Dish

Ponca City, We love you writes "The NY Times has the story of researchers at Sandia National Laboratories creating what is in effect a vast digital petri dish able to hold one million operating systems at once in an effort to study the behavior of botnets. Sandia scientist Ron Minnich, the inventor of LinuxBIOS, and his colleague Don Rudish have converted a Dell supercomputer to simulate a mini-Internet of one million computers. The researchers say they hope to be able to infect their digital petri dish with a botnet and then gather data on how the system behaves. 'When a forest is on fire you can fly over it, but with a cyber-attack you have no clear idea of what it looks like,' says Minnich. 'It's an extremely difficult task to get a global picture.' The Dell Thunderbird supercomputer, named MegaTux, has 4,480 Intel microprocessors running Linux virtual machines with Wine, making it possible to run 1 million copies of a Windows environment without paying licensing fees to Microsoft. MegaTux is an example of a new kind of computational science, in which computers are used to simulate scientific instruments that were once used in physical world laboratories. In the past, the researchers said, no one has tried to program a computer to simulate more than tens of thousands of operating systems."

Comments

They can't afford an MSDN subscription?

[n0tWorthy]

Then they can run 1 million copies without a subscription.

But -- how can you infect it?

[Nefarious Wheel]

My first thought meme was "Yes, but does it run Linux?" ("Megatux". Duh.) Then I thought - hang on, how can you develop a botnet that runs on Linux in the first place? And if you did, how would it reflect the nature of real botnets if those millions of operating systems weren't running NT4 or variants?

Then it got surreal - I imagined all those bots emulating the game of life , with little dots flashing on and off, and little gliders and factories...

Ok, I'll go back to work now.

Re:WINE

[monopole]

I hope Microsoft issues a statement that only Genuine Windows software can fully support viruses and malware in an effective fashion.

Re:WINE

[Eighty7]

In other news, Miguel de Icaza said that he believes botnet support is a good idea. Linux should support malware because Microsoft is going to win anyway, so linux would better be prepared if it doesn't want to be locked out of the future markets, and presented a beta version of the software. Members of the Mono project are participating in the standarization.

Old News...

[davevr]

There is already a system running somewhere around 420 million windows machines in a semi-private walled-off version of the internet, with no license fees paid to Microsoft, hosting several botnets and just about every virus under the sun.

It is called "China".

Re:Is that really a windows environment?

[Antique Geekmeister]

Lease time on one of the larger botnets?