What the Heck are Botnets?

” A botnet is similar to required military service for flowerpots” – Stromberg (http://project.honeynet.org/papers/bots/)

Botnets are networks of computer systems that hackers have actually contaminated and organized together under their control to propagate infections, send out prohibited spam, and perform attacks that trigger website to crash.

What makes botnets extremely bad is the problem in tracing them back to their developers as well as the ever-increasing usage of them in extortion plans. Envision somebody sending you messages to either pay up or see your web website crash.

Botnets can include countless jeopardized makers. With such a big network, botnets can utilize Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) as an approach to trigger chaos and turmoil. A little botnet with just 500 bots can bring business web websites to there knees by utilizing the combined bandwidth of all the computer systems to overwhelm business systems and consequently trigger the web website to appear offline.

Jeremy Kirk, IDG News Service on January 19, 2006, estimates Kevin Hogan, senior supervisor for Symantec Security Response, in his short article “Botnets diminishing in size, more difficult to trace”, Hogan states “extortion plans have actually emerged backed by the muscle of botnets, and hackers are likewise leasing making use of armadas of computer systems for unlawful functions through ads online.”

One popular method to fight botnets is a honeypot. A Honeypot is basically a set of resources that one plans to be jeopardized in order to study how the hackers break the system.

A terrific website to research this subject more is The Honeynet Project (http://project.honeynet.org) which explains its own website’s goal as “To find out the intentions, tools and methods associated with computer system and network attacks, and share the lessons found out.”

What makes botnets exceptionally bad is the problem in tracing them back to their developers as well as the ever-increasing usage of them in extortion plans. With such a big network, botnets can utilize Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) as an approach to trigger trouble and mayhem. A little botnet with just 500 bots can bring business web websites to there knees by utilizing the combined bandwidth of all the computer systems to overwhelm business systems and thus trigger the web website to appear offline.