Slashdot Mirror
Raising a Botnet In Captivity
holy_calamity writes "Technology Review reports that researchers installed 3000 copies of Windows XP on a high performance cluster at a Canadian university and set loose the Waledac botnet on them. It's the first time researchers have built and operated their own botnet as a strategy to better understand those at large on the internet. Doing it inside an experimental computing cluster removes the legal and ethical complications of experimenting with live botnets that control innocent users' machines."
I'm not quite sure why they chosen to do that; where is the fun in running a botnet in a simulated environment? Wouldn't it be much better to do it in real environment?
http://xkcd.com/350/
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
licensed copies?
Considering that they most assuredly have the go ahead from Redmond to install 3000 copies of XP. (because Canadian universities sure as hell could not afford to license it legally). Perhaps this is really just an experiment in cloud computing sponsored by Microsoft....
... and they discovered it's utterly uselessness?
After effects, more research needed. Cylon sentience attained on the first day. They keep it running until Tricia Helfer steps out of their 3D printer.
This is the FIRST time a botnet has been studied in captivity? Did they need an excuse? A hall pass?
Anyone got a good reason why it took this long to study a botnet in captivity when researchers have been able to purchase these tools on black hat sites for as long as they have? Otherwise I call shenanigans. Red tape, bureaucracy, what have you.
Seriously, is this the first time this and been done?
I would have thought that mcafee and semantic and the other anti-virus companies would have been doing this as a matter of course for the past decade.
What on earth are their subscription fees for?
I think it's interesting that our software mechanisms have become so advanced that we can't dissect them to understand what they are doing, we have to observe them in their environments to understand how they work or perhaps they just couldn't be bothered to sink resources into better analysis techniques of bytecode...
innocent users
Ha! I like that.
Contrary to what seems to be common belief here, you don't get free XP because you have a volume license. You have to pay for those copies.
It would be far more beneficial to (almost) everyone if they studied the people involved in creating botnets in captivity. If not for the legal issues involved with that idea...
This is the FIRST time a botnet has been studied in captivity?
Probably not, but isn't a botnet without a 'net connection just a worm?
I thought the whole point of a botnet was that it received external commands.
From TFA: Fortunately, the new approach is being tested using a high-powered computing cluster that is safely isolated from the Internet.
Oops. That was $18.5. Never mind.
"It was [...] something of a challenge to convince the owner of a cluster worth around $1 million that installing malware onto it was a good idea." The question remains: is he referring to Waledac or Windows xp?
Lawlz I say. This is the first time someone has openly bothered to declare it's the first time. Other people just did their thing and not brag about it. I mean isn't that done at hackfest every year?
Us non-stupid users run OpenBSD on sparc64, Linux on PA-RISC, or FreeBSD on IA-64.
Note: do not browse the web with telnet unless you want to get pwn3d. It has everything to do with **terminal** stupidity, as in ESC [ evilness.
Try:
a) And they discovered its utter uselessness?
b) And they discovered it's utterly useless?
a + b != c