[ISN] Sandia to boot behemoth botnet

From: InfoSec News <alerts_at_private>
Date: Tue, 11 Aug 2009 01:31:55 -0500 (CDT)
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.

[...]


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Received on Mon Aug 10 2009 - 23:31:55 PDT

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