Botnets in USA Today

By -
I got a call from Byron Acohido over at the USA Today last weekend,
and we had an interesting talk about botnets. Byron and Jon Swartz ended
up writing an article about botnets which appeared as the cover story
in the Money section of the USA Today on March 17, 2008. Here's a link to the full
story (link). I found the entire article to be a fascinating read
on the nature of botnets. Here are some of the highlights, but
definitely go and read the entire article.
  • On a typical day, 40% of the 800 million computers connected to the Internet are bots engaged in various nefarious activities, such as spamming, stealing sensitive data, and engaging in denial-of-service attacks. Think about it. Approximately 320 million computers are engaged these illicit actiivities!
  • Later on in the article they describe various features of Storm, the state-of-the-art for botnets. Storm introduced various innovations into the bot landscape, such as using P2P style communication to converse with the bots and encrypting the command-and-control (C&C) traffic. Command-and-control is the traffic from the bot-herder to the bots instructing them to perform various nefarious activities. Note that this means that various network-based botnet solutions that simply look for centralized C&C communication will not work. Moreover, encrypted traffic is a major problem for the network-based solutions. See my earlier blog where I argue that we should move to a cooperative solution. This is looking like a very good idea. Storm also has a self-defense mechanism, i.e., anyone trying to probe the botnet is punished with a denial-of-service attack. I found this self-defense mechanism of Storm to be very interesting.
Overall a fascinating article!
I plan to drop by Byron's book signing at the RSA Conference in San
Francisco on April 7th. Byron also has an interesting blog which is related to the
material in the book.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Malware Trend in 2007

By -
I read the report IBM Internet Security System X-Force 2007 Trend Statistics. This is a report describing trends for various threats in 2007. This team has been tracking trends since 2000. I found the report to be quite interesting. In the rest of this post, I highlight some of the interesting points from the report and what they mean in the context of malware detection. (I) The X-Force team reports continued growth in Web browser exploitation. This clearly shows that the infection vector is changing to the Web. Earlier the primary infection vectors were email and the network. Therefore, for detecting malware, drive-by-downloads (DBD) and other threats targeted at hacking through the Web browser need a lot of attention. (II) X-Force also reports a marked increase in obfuscated exploits, i.e., exploits that use various code obfuscation techiques (such as encryption). Here is a quote, "X-Force estimated that nearly 80 percent of Web exploits used obfuscation and/or self decryption .
Read more

Model Checking and Security

By -
Model checking is a technique of verifying temporal properties of finite-state systems. One of the attractive features of model checking over other techniques (such as theorem proving) is that if a property is not true, a model checker provides a counter-example which explains why the property is not true. Inventors of model checking, Edmund Clarke, Allen Emerson, and Joseph Sifakis, won the 2008 ACM Turing award (see the announcement here ). I have a personal connection to two of the recipients. Edmund Clarke was my adviser at Carnegie Mellon, and Allen Emerson and I have collaborated on few projects and he has supported me through out my career. In this note I try to summarize various applications of model checking to security. Protocol verification : Protocols in the realm of security (henceforth referred to as security protocols) are very tricky to get correct. For example, flaws in authentication protocols have been discovered several years after they have been published. Techniqu
Read more