digg

Facebook Connect Join Digg About
See the original image at techradar.com

Botnets: Who's Behind Them and Why?

techradar.com — For every 10,000 messages sent, "at least one per cent" will respond and become part of a botnet. A team from Cisco's Security Intelligence Operations found that for botmasters, criminality is just a by-product of running a small business.

Who dugg this? Made popular Oct 27, 2009

Digg DudeWhat is Digg?

Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. Digg surfaces the best stuff as submitted and voted on by the community. Take the Tour to learn more.

41 Comments

show profanity settings
expand all
  • LightPhoenix, on 10/27/2009, -3/+26I was hoping this article would go into a little more depth as to it went down.
  • king_aaronj, on 10/27/2009, -1/+20<sarcasm> great article. Really gives me tons of info on botnets and why people do this stuff. </sarcasm>

    really? I wouldn't mind reading a piece about this, but please, go in depth! Give me a couple pages of good solid info.
  • Mankind121, on 10/27/2009, -1/+16Wow, another sub-par Techradar article
  • wexmajor, on 10/27/2009, -1/+8"criminality is just a by-product of running a small business."

    No *****? Not many people do illegal things for the hell of being criminals.
  • Meocross, on 10/27/2009, -1/+7These comments suck.
  • entropy71, on 10/27/2009, -0/+4Unless you're working for a major ISP there isn't much you can do to mitigate a sophisticated DDOS attack.
  • Bangaarang, on 10/27/2009, -2/+5This article was full of suck.
  • WomensUnderwear, on 10/27/2009, -1/+4Suck
  • tacojohn48, on 10/27/2009, -1/+4Come to the dark side; we have cookies.
  • petershultz, on 10/27/2009, -1/+3Or not?

    How do you know that you don't have an undetected virus on your computer? There are viruses in existance that Anti-Virus programs don't pick up. Should we unplug you?
  • tacojohn48, on 10/27/2009, -1/+3Have you read Steve Gibson's analysis of a ddos attack? http://www.crime-research.org/library/grcdos.pdf I couldn't find the link on his site anymore, but found this link of it.
  • MAGZine, on 10/27/2009, -2/+4Why? Primary reasons are blackhat:
    -Monetary motivation (reselling bots, sending spam)
    -Authority motivated (I can DDoS you, so stfu)
    -External motivation motivation (using the bots for uncommon purposes, such as working on creating rainbow hash tables, registering accounts, checking account names, crawling the web, etc)
    -For file serving
    -For fun (some people enjoy making other people's lives crap)

    Primary reason for white/grayhat:
    -getting attention drawn to a major security hole that needs to be fixed

    It's actually rarely about holding a domain ransom.

    There. insight that a journalist will have a bitch of a time getting a hold of.
  • unluckier, on 10/27/2009, -1/+3The author clearly doesn't even have a good grasp of the concept of "percent". To say "one percent for every 10,000" doesn't even make sense. (one per hundred per 10,000)
  • ohplease, on 10/27/2009, -5/+7It's time for ISPs to start unplugging users who are stupid enough to be part of a botnet. We can no longer coddle the idiots and ***** the rest of us over.
  • unluckier, on 10/27/2009, -0/+2Have fun with the litigation when a life is lost due to the inability to call 911 because you turned off their digital phone service because of suspicious traffic.
  • king_aaronj, on 10/27/2009, -0/+2I haven't, but thanks. I'll read it. I love his work on Security Now.
  • arunforce, on 10/27/2009, -2/+3Power and Money.

    In a highly competitive website-run small business, the easiest way to take out your opponents and cripple their revenue is by DDoSing their server and making the site inaccessible and also in hopes of bringing that traffic back to them through Google or what not.

    This is coming from an admin of a medium sized site that regularly gets DDoSed.
  • MattBD, on 10/27/2009, -0/+1That's why services like Skype specifically say they don't support emergency calls.
  • mister711, on 10/28/2009, -0/+1your mom is a botnet herd
  • damnshoes, on 10/27/2009, -0/+1
  • WCJessie, on 10/29/2009, -0/+1Great topic, lame article.
  • psion01, on 10/27/2009, -0/+1Wow. Someone really dislikes this particular line of humor. I think that's the last time I play straight man for you.
  • thefarside420, on 10/27/2009, -1/+1Is there a significant consideration for the queen bee? What of blue violets? What 19th century American author would you like to feed salmon?
  • securityskeptic, on 10/29/2009, -0/+0911 VoIP and 911 services from PSTN are different (still). Not only Skype but other VoIP providers are careful to explain the constraints (for example, 911 VoIP may not be available during power outages). If you're interested read

    http://www.fcc.gov.akadns.net/cgb/consumerfacts/vo ...
  • FyberOptic, on 10/27/2009, -1/+1I remember their main irc.dal.net not working for a long long time. You had to know the individual servers in order to even get on. Then their user count dropped to pathetic numbers, and it was nothing like it used to be.

    Last I looked, it was mostly arab and indian folks on there now.
  • psion01, on 10/27/2009, -2/+1Not much of a spoiler, then. C'mon! How about a hint?
  • SammyboyKIDDAH, on 10/27/2009, -2/+1And botnets for sale!
  • NYYBronxBombers, on 10/27/2009, -3/+2just ask DALnet about botnets... nearly destroyed their irc network years ago. (and the fact that they no longer supported dcc sends)
  • singu, on 10/27/2009, -2/+1Don't forget the Ukrainians and the Koreans .... yeah, for the same reason
  • tacojohn48, on 10/27/2009, -2/+1I would guess that rule would mirror the group behind the botnets rule.
  • ileftfark, on 10/27/2009, -7/+3Russians.

    For money.
  • penguinofspades, on 10/27/2009, -6/+1skynet
  • burrdugg, on 10/27/2009, -5/+0I believe botnets are a sentient life form on a mission to destroy humanity.
  • SammyboyKIDDAH, on 10/27/2009, -6/+1..because the dark side is the cool side. \m/
  • draculthemad, on 10/27/2009, -8/+3Most of the dos attacks out there these days are part of a botnet it seems. Its irritating, but there is often very little you can do to mitigate a DOS thats sufficiently distributed.
  • ptFoe, on 10/27/2009, -7/+2Thanks Windows
  • SammyboyKIDDAH, on 10/27/2009, -8/+2Instead of sarcasm coded in HTML, try this tag at the end of what you say..
    /s

    It's used a lot around here! =)
  • kosa, on 10/27/2009, -13/+6first rule of botnet, dont talk about botnet
  • Murrabbit, on 10/26/2009, -13/+6Spoiler alert: It's all me. You won't find out why 'till it's too late. MUAHAHAHAHAAH!
  • TangentThought, on 10/27/2009, -8/+1The only bot messages I ever get are ones from Project Upstream. Thank god I found the site to remove my AIM screen name from that annoying thing.

    Yeah it's not really relevant, but it was annoying enough to be remembered from reading this article.
  • inactive, on 10/27/2009, -13/+2my company does it, no problem. if yah need help, let me know :D

  • Add a Comment

    Login or register to comment!
    Or, sign-in super fast with your Facebook account ...


© Digg Inc. 2009 — Content created and posted by Digg users is dedicated to the public domain | Terms of Use Updated | Privacy Policy
DIGG, DIGG IT, DUGG, DIGG THIS, Digg graphics, logos, designs, page headers, button icons, scripts, and other service names are the trademarks of Digg Inc.