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."

Comments

To the cloud!!?

[Anonymous Coward]

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....