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."

Another paper on "Malicious Hardware"

[Schnoodledorfer]

How about this one: Designing and Implementing Malicious Hardware [usenix.org]? Now that people are figuring out how to deal with Storm, we may have to start worrying about bogus ICs that will be designed to allow your computer to be compromised easily. Damn! Interesting, though. It was awarded "Best Paper".

Re:Nifty

[plover]

Then you should be impressed by the right people, like Enzo Michelangeli, who wrote the KadC [sourceforge.net] DHT library that the storm worm authors used.

Sure, these guys are somewhat clever, but they're not the real geniuses behind the technology.

And yes, the researchers did a great job, too. It's not easy picking unknown protocols apart!