http://gcn.com/articles/2009/08/10/sandia-botnet.aspx By Joab Jackson GCN.com Aug 10, 2009 Starting in October, a huge botnet will be run not by nefarious underground figures but by the Energy Department's Sandia National Laboratories. The lab's Thunderbird supercomputer will periodically run a million virtual machines all at once, all with botnet client software. By setting this large network of systems into operation, the researchers, Ron Minnich and Don Rudish, hope to better understand how botnets operate. "If you want to take a look at what is really threatening the Internet, we have to talk about the scale of the network we are working with," Rudish said. "One million gets us pretty close to understanding these botnets." Typically used by spammers, botnets are comprised of thousands or even millions of Internet-connected PCs. The owners of such machines are typically unaware that their machines have been infected with secret programs that do the bidding of the botnet operator. Botnet operators tend to deploy their creations for spamming, distributed denial-of-service attacks, and other nefarious activities. Botnets are difficult to study in the wild because the computers are geographically dispersed. By approximating the size of a good-sized botnet, the researchers can understand how botnets operate and the effects they have. [...] ___________________________________________________ Visit and Submit to the Defcon Memory Repository http://www.defconpics.org/Received on Mon Aug 10 2009 - 23:31:55 PDT
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