From Pine View Farm

Is Your Computer a Bot? 3

Kelly Martin has a fascinating article on “botnets” in Security focus:

What is a botnet? Today it’s an illegal collection of hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of compromised computers all being controlled with a common infrastructure. There’s even one case where a real botnet was found with about 1.5 million machines under one person’s control. Incredible. According to Symantec’s latest Internet Threat Report, 26% of all bot-infected computers are also located in the United States – making it the number one source of bots. These are most often home computers with viruses or web servers with buggy software that are compromised and then linked together for evil purposes. They’re usually controlled from a central location as well, providing a single point of failure, but as peer-to-peer botnets are developed the ability to fight this evil will certainly change.

If you don’t care about securing your computer, you ought to. Or you are part of the problem.

And once you do, you should read this article. It contains a lot of information in a small space.

With a tip of the hat to El Reg.

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3 comments

  1. Phillybits

    May 1, 2006 at 6:12 pm

    Speaking of bots and computer security, I was just reading today a post from Friday, about a DDoS attack, mislabeled as a DoS attack, on a webhost that also happened to carry a bunch of conservative bloggers. Since they do shared hosting, of course, many blogs were affected.

    The belief? That since incoming IP addresses resolved to Saudi Arabia, it must be cyber-jihadists.

    My breakdown? Descriptions of a DDoS attack, some likely scenarios, how just because an IP says it comes from Saudi Arabia doesn’t mean it really did.

    Conservative bloggers. Misrepresenting and twisting the truth since 2000.

     
  2. Frank

    May 2, 2006 at 5:42 am

    And you expected them to do their homework?

    “Politics uber truth,” the rightwing motto.

     
  3. Phillybits

    May 3, 2006 at 8:00 pm

    It actually got quite heated at times and in the end, I was called out on whether “I was a believer” or not. I think this post answered the question quite well.