What are Botnets?

“A botnet is comparable to to obligatory militaristic service for windows boxes”Botnets are electronic networks of computers that hackers have infected and classified together under their mastery to circulate viruses, send prohibited spam, and conduct out attacks that cause web sites to crash.What makes botnets exceedingly bad is the difficulty in tracing them back to their creators as well as the ever-increasing use of them in extortion strategies. How are they utilised in extortion strategies? Imagine somebody posting to you messages to either pay up or see your web website crash. This scenario is starting to replay itself over and over again.Botnets can consist of thousands of compromised machines. With such a enormous meshwork, botnets can use Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) as a method to induce havoc and chaos. For example a moderate botnet with only 500 bots can bring corporate web sites to there knees by using the aggregated bandwidth of all the computers to overwhelm corporate systems and thereby cause the web site to appear offline.Jeremy Kirk, IDG News Service on January 19, 2006, quotes Kevin Hogan, senior manager for Symantec Security Response, in his article “Botnets shrinking in size, harder to trace”, Hogan says “extortion schemes have emerged backed by the muscle of botnets, and hackers are also renting the use of armadas of computers for illegal purposes through advertisements on the Web.”One famous technique to combat botnets is a honeypot. Honeypots help find how attackers penetrate organizations. A Honeypot is essentially a set of resources that one intends to be compromised in order to study how the cyber-terrorist break the system. Unpatched Windows 2000 or XP machines make great honeypots given the ease with which one can take over such systems.A good site to read up on this theme more is The Honeynet Project (http://project.honeynet.org) which describes its own site’s aim as “To learn the tools, tactics and motives involved in computer and electronic network onslaughts, and share the object lessons learned.”