Twitter Used To Control Botnet Machines

DikSeaCup writes "Arbor Network's Jose Nazario, an expert on botnets, discovered what looks to be the first reported case of hackers using Twitter to control botnets. 'Hackers have long used IRC chat rooms to control botnets, and have continually used clever technologies, such as peer-to-peer strategies, to counter efforts to track, disrupt and sometimes decapitate the bots. Perhaps what's surprising then is that it's taken so long for hackers to take Twitter to the dark side.' The next step, of course, is to code the tweets in such a way that they aren't so suspicious."

Comments

You go Jose!

[GPLDAN]

Jose and those guys at Arbor are doing really concrete things to curb botnets and malware contagion. They have their gear in a great number of peering points around the world, and are correlating huge amounts of data into discrete patterns. I've seen Jose speak a couple of times, and I am impressed by the manner in which they are finding the ghosts who think they can't be found.

Re:You go Jose!

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I've seen Jose speak a couple of times, and I am impressed by the manner in which they are finding the ghosts who think they can't be found.

I haven't talked to Jose for a while, but last I heard he and the other guys were doing well finding new types of malware and separating out malicious network traffic that is hard to differentiate from legitimate traffic. That said, they were not really doing things to find the one off attacks perpetrated by people who weren't interested in large scale and automated network attacks. The people I'd call ghosts are the ones who do small scale, specifically targeted attacks to get what they want, then walk away. If you're running a botnet, you aren't being very ghostlike; maybe more vampire like :)