Storm Dismantled at USENIX LEET Workshop

An anonymous reader writes "The USENIX LEET workshop held earlier this week in San Francisco offered neat insights into the Storm botnet, including two papers showing the difficulty of accurately measuring the botnet's size, and one on the way it conducts its spamming campaigns (down to the template language used). There was a bunch of other cool work too, so check out the papers."

Nifty

[locokamil]

After reading the article, I'm impressed by both the ingenuity of the researchers in infiltrating the network, and also by the skills of the malware writers. Engineering a DHT-based network is no trivial matter, and the fact that people out there went through the trouble of creating one implies that the payoff must have been commensurate to the effort involved.

Scary.

My pet love/hate for botnets

[Fluffeh]

I hate spam and what botnets do as much as the next fellow, to the point where I stopped checking email on a regular basis from a few accounts due to the insane amounts of spam I got, but I still have to admire the sheer beauty and audacity of putting together such a living thing. If only they could find a useful (even semi-legit) purpose for harnessing so much computing power.

Re:Nifty

[Anonymous Coward]

Think about it in this way:
You can hire PhD level programmer for around £500 per month full time. Think how much for 18 year old whizz kid?

Believe me those guys are good. No questions asked.

Re:Nifty

[Pig Hogger]

After reading the article, I'm impressed by both the ingenuity of the researchers in infiltrating the network, and also by the skills of the malware writers. Engineering a DHT-based network is no trivial matter, and the fact that people out there went through the trouble of creating one implies that the payoff must have been commensurate to the effort involved.

Given how the "legit" private sector treats it's employees like shit (layoffs, outsourcing, PHBs, etc.), it's no surprise that there is no shortage of disgruntled employees who will gladly write malware for a good payoff or simply for revenge.

OMG

[PenguSven]

After reading up a little more on botnets, it's clear now that SkyNet will in fact originate as a spam and DOS attack/delivery "platform", which will become sentient, and try to kill us all by destroying the internet!