According to a March Netcraft article, botnets are abundant on the net. Says the article:

“Botnets” of compromised computers launched 226 distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on 99 different targets in a three-month period from November to January, according to new research from the Honeynet Project.

The Honeynet Project paper states that the scope of the activity is rather impressive:

The project tracked more than 100 active botnets, including one containing 50,000 compromised “zombie” machines. In the three-month tracking period, Honeynet detected 226,585 unique IP addresses joining at least one of the IRC channels being monitored. Since the project sees only a portion of active botnets, the report

said that even by conservative estimates, “this would mean that more then one million hosts are compromised

and can be controlled by malicious attackers.”

Worse, according to Honeynet (as quoted in the Netcraft article), the activity seems increasingly well-organized and adept:

“Our research shows that some attackers are highly skilled and organized, potentially belonging to well organized crime structures,” the report concludes. “Leveraging the power of several thousand bots, it is viable to take down almost any website or network instantly. Even in unskilled hands, it should be obvious that botnets are a loaded and powerful weapon.”

My refrain of late to everyone I’m in contact with has been: ‘You’re nuts if you connect a Microsoft Windows box to the net. Consider your financial information already gone if you’ve done so. Worse is connecting with no firewall. If you do so, may the Great Kavod help you (or flush you from this mortal coil expeditiously).’

I arrived at the Netcraft article on the Honeynet paper via this May 4th Netcraft post on botnet controlled DNS nameservers.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 4th, 2005 at 9:33 am and is filed under Computer Science, General, Internet, Network Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.