What the Heck are Botnets?

"A botnet is equivalent to compulsory Windows box military service" - Stromberg (http://project.honeynet.org)

Botnets are computer networks, which hackers have compromised and gathered under their control to spread infections, send unlawful spam, and carry out website crashes.

The problem with tracing botnets back to their authors and their ever-increasing use in extortion systems is extremely harmful. How are they used for extortion? Imagine someone sending you messages to either pay or see a crash on your website. This situation begins to play again and again.

Botnets might consist of thousands of devices that have been compromised. Botnets can utilize Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) for chasing and chaos with such a big network. A small botnet with only 500 bots, for example, can bring company websites to its knees by exploiting the combined bandwidth of all machines in order to overwhelm business infrastructure and make the website appear offline.

In his article "Botnets shrinking in size and more difficult to track," Jeremy Kirk, IDG News Service on 19 January 2006, quotes Kevin Hogan, senior manager for Symantec Security Response, in his article "Extortion Schemes have emerged supported by botnet muscle, and hackers are also renting armadas of computer for illegal purposes by means of Web advertising."

A honeypot is a well-known method of combating botnets. Honeypots assist you to find out how assailants infiltrate systems. A honeypot is essentially a set of resources that one wants to infiltrate to examine how hackers break the system. Unpatched Windows 2000 or XP workstations make for fantastic honeypots, as such systems can be easily controlled.

The Honeynet Project (http://project.honeynet.org) advertises its own website as "to learn the tools, Tactics and reasons of computer attacks and networking attacks and share lessons learned."