Sandia Studies Botnets In 1M OS Digital Petri Dish 161
Ponca City, We love you writes "The NY Times has the story of researchers at Sandia National Laboratories creating what is in effect a vast digital petri dish able to hold one million operating systems at once in an effort to study the behavior of botnets. Sandia scientist Ron Minnich, the inventor of LinuxBIOS, and his colleague Don Rudish have converted a Dell supercomputer to simulate a mini-Internet of one million computers. The researchers say they hope to be able to infect their digital petri dish with a botnet and then gather data on how the system behaves. 'When a forest is on fire you can fly over it, but with a cyber-attack you have no clear idea of what it looks like,' says Minnich. 'It's an extremely difficult task to get a global picture.' The Dell Thunderbird supercomputer, named MegaTux, has 4,480 Intel microprocessors running Linux virtual machines with Wine, making it possible to run 1 million copies of a Windows environment without paying licensing fees to Microsoft. MegaTux is an example of a new kind of computational science, in which computers are used to simulate scientific instruments that were once used in physical world laboratories. In the past, the researchers said, no one has tried to program a computer to simulate more than tens of thousands of operating systems."
Life imitates XKCD (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Life imitates XKCD (Score:5, Informative)
Well, given that XKCD was imitating an old hacker competition...
Re:Life imitates XKCD (Score:4, Informative)
Goes to show that ideas are a dime a dozen.
Implementing something like this is what makes the news.
Not exactly. (Score:5, Insightful)
A patent on an IMPLEMENTATION of an idea is a good thing.
A patent on an idea itself ... that's stupid. And that's what we're stuck with today.
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I've got an easier way (Score:3, Insightful)
what is in effect a vast digital petri dish able to hold one million operating systems at once in an effort to study the behavior of botnets
If they've set up this mini-internet and have set up this botnet, then the easiest way to understand its behavior would be to look at the source code
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OK, here's seven hundred million lines of source code. Come back when you've solved the halting problem.
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OK, here's seven hundred million lines of source code. Come back when you've solved the halting problem.
Power switch. Halts that sucker every time.
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The source code does not help you to imange what happens in peer to peer network with very large amounts of cleints that have a different kind of environment. Not to mention software that has bugs.
BTW... who is the first to post to the xkcd comic about it [xkcd.com] normal people have aquaria
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Uhh, the First Post?
Re:I've got an easier way (Score:4, Insightful)
Just like the easiest way to understand how a dog works is to dissect them.
In short, no. You can figure out how some of the parts work, but there's a lot within complex software that is non-deterministic, whether for internal, external, or thoroughly inadvertant reasons on either side. Just because you _think_ you know what it's doing doesn't mean it'll act the way you expect it to.
Also, see http://xkcd.com/397/ [xkcd.com]
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If it's unclear what the code does, run it in a debugger and control the inputs. Step through the code line by line. If the debugger doesn't do everything you want, write a better debugger.
I have to agree that this seems like a silly idea. Comparing the complexity of a botnet program to a dog is silly. It also ignores the fact that code run in a debug environment can look at every single aspect of running code while it's running. A dog is obviously many many many orders of magnitude more complex.
Re:I've got an easier way (Score:5, Insightful)
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Maybe. But why use ACTUAL botnets for this purpose and not study the underlying algorithms and infection behavior directly? That would give you the ability to generalize instead of relying on -botnet X, version z-
If that's what you care about, study it. Why rely on botnet authors to code some arbitrary botnet spreading code when you can write your own and study various different scenarios at will?
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Re:I've got an easier way (Score:5, Insightful)
If it's unclear what the code does, run it in a debugger and control the inputs. Step through the code line by line. If the debugger doesn't do everything you want, write a better debugger.
Is that right?
Here, I'll describe a program so simple it can be coded in under 100 lines, and can be fully specified in a few sentences, then ask you a question about its behavior. It should be easy, right?
There is a 100x100 grid of cells. Each cell is in one of two states "live" or "dead". Each cell has 8 neighbors, the cells horizontally, vertically and diagonally adjacent (the edges of the grid "wrap", so this is true even for edge cells). Each "generation", the state of the cells is updated according to the following rules:
That's it. Now, given an initial state of the grid, tell me what the state is after 100, 500 and 1000 generations. Further, tell me whether or not any patterns of live cells will survive across across generations. Will patterns repeat? Can patterns move? Interact?
Amazing complexity can arise from very simple rules. In this case (known as Conway's Game of Life, if you hadn't recognized it), the above rules contain enough power that if you make the grid infinite in size, the result is a Turing-complete computation system. In addition, the shifting patterns it creates are bewildering in their number, complexity and behavior.
Now scale that up to thousands of lines of code. Granted, not code specifically chosen to create interesting interactions, but still 2-3 orders of magnitude more complex. Further, code that itself lives in and interacts with a complex and varied ecosystem of other code, some of which is trying to detect the code and kill it -- so the code is written to be self-modifying, to "mutate" a bit, after a fashion. Also add in the ability to migrate between "ecosystems", reproduce, receive deliberate external updates and instructions, etc.
Simulation is the only way to get a handle on this sort of thing. And that's why the very smart people who designed and built the world's first million-machine simulator decided to do it.
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If by dissecting the dog you got access to the 'source code' of the 'program' which runs the dog you might actually get a better idea of how a dog functions and *why* it does so. Alas, this is not possible - yet. Genetic information can be decoded quite easily nowadays but whatever goes on in the brain is still mostly a mystery.
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Exactly and biologists should only look at the DNA of animals to understand their behavior.
Just because we know what the instructions are doesn't mean we can account for what will happen when those instructions actually meet any given environment. Even simple things like instructions for installing or using software should be tested on some users in order to see their pitfalls and problems.
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ron
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Just like the easiest way to understand human behavior is to look at our genetic code?
Nope. It's not that simple at that level.
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You can't study emergent behavior [wikipedia.org] by studying source code. Even within one host, the interactions between malware, applications and every the piece of the OS would already have emergent properties. Magnify by tens of thousands to millions (exponentially [wikipedia.org], not additively or multiplicatively), and the sheer complexity of the entire system would overwhelm our ability to understand it.
We have ~100 billion neurons and ~100 trillion synapses. At 2^N - N - 1 subgroups, how many pieces before the system's complexity
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You have the source for this trojan? First, I'd pay well for it. Second, there are some guys that wanna talk with you.
Even if you had the source (which isn't really that long, judging from its disassembly), it's like trying to figure out how two different classes play in an MMO from the values of their attacks. If it was easy, balancing would be trivial.
Also, this "petri dish" allows you to test vaccines and remedies, and check how successful they are. With much better accuracy than a statistical "what if"
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If they've set up this mini-internet and have set up this botnet, then the easiest way to understand its behavior would be to look at the source code
By that logic, by dissecting a single neuron you would be able to understand how a human brain works. Unfortunately, human brains have a wide number of different neurons, each of which serve a separate purpose. While the DNA may contain the instructions to build a brain, it's not possible to deduce what the final layout will be.
Similarly, in a botnet, each host
First Findings! (Score:3, Funny)
But -- how can you infect it? (Score:4, Funny)
Then it got surreal - I imagined all those bots emulating the game of life [wikipedia.org], with little dots flashing on and off, and little gliders and factories...
Ok, I'll go back to work now.
They can't afford an MSDN subscription? (Score:3, Funny)
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Someone marked this as 'funny' but it is true. Read the license it is per user... If your creating a cluster with THOUSANDS of nodes and testing things you are perfectly within your rights to do this. You can even get most of the different versions of the OS going. 98, 98se, 95 (shudder), ME (double shudder), NT4, 2k, XP, Vista, 7, etc... Putting different versions at different patch levels etc...
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/cc150618.aspx [microsoft.com]
They lost me at Wine. As that would not truly c
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They lost me at Wine. As that would not truly create the environment they are trying to describe.
I have had up to 100 desktops all going from 10 msdn licenses (10 users). With different levels of the OS to test install and different configurations. They probably dont even need a very high level of it.
You're looking at this at the wrong level. They're interested in what the botnets do, not in what the hosts do. What runs the botnet software is irrelevant as long as it runs it.
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Just imagine all the clicking to set up and manage 1 million Windows environments. No mouse can stand up to that. Imagine all the bandwidth 1 million copies of windows phoning home would burn up.
Is that really a windows environment? (Score:5, Interesting)
However, the summary seems to claim that Wine == Windows environment. I don't see how they are analogous in this sense. In particular, if you are trying to understand botnet behavior, you need infected botnet systems. Is there a way to make Wine vulnerable to the infections that frequently hit Windows systems?
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Welcome to the world of open source software. The place where you can modify the code in any way you want.
Though Wine is just an API, AFAIK. It would seem that you would need to modify it extensively to actually have it truly behave like Windows. And I suspect not all botnet infections exploit the same Windows flaws, so wouldn't the total number of vulnerabilities to implement into Wine to reach the same level of vulnerability be rather substantial?
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Actually it would be plain more easier to just code their own virii and botnets, while modifying Wine slightly to make sure that the virtual computers get infected and the infection vector works.
They are not interested in how a certain virtual computer behaves like after all, but rather on how the mini-internet looks like as a result of these infections.
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Since this is a closed environment for a scientific study, it would make sense for them to use viruses which spread via exploits that they know are present.
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Since this is a closed environment for a scientific study, it would make sense for them to use viruses which spread via exploits that they know are present.
Captain Obvious here... If they create the exploits and viruses themselves, they might have a pretty good idea of the infection vectors. It doesn't have to be what's in the wild now. Even better that it NOT be; after all, Robert Morris didn't expect his worm [wikipedia.org] to replicate as far as it did, either...
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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Modifying Wine to emulate a Windows machine which is vulnerable to viruses does not result in a Windows machine. You still just have Linux running Wine. The very idea behind these tests is already critically flawed.
A previous poster already got it right. The researchers should just buy a MSDN Universal license and legally run 1M instances of actual Windows. Otherwise, their findings will have little to no real value (IMO).
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Hell, they should have just called Microsoft, said "we'd like to do this research" and gotten a license to do things that way.
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Re:Is that really a windows environment? (Score:4, Insightful)
The research isn't to determine how Windows reacts to a botnet. They're trying to figure out how the botnet itself communicates and spreads. Or, more specifically, what the botnet looks like as it is spreading. Windows is just the platform that they're running the botnet on (sort of), but they don't really care how Windows reacts to it.
In other words, they're studying the botnet itself, not the infrastructure it runs on.
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In that case, why use Wine at all? Why not just write a pure Linux botnet?
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When why bother with Wine at all? Isn't that just an added layer of complexity?
Re:Is that really a windows environment? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see how they are analogous in this sense. In particular, if you are trying to understand botnet behavior, you need infected botnet systems. Is there a way to make Wine vulnerable to the infections that frequently hit Windows systems?
WINE is an implementation of the Win32 API. Since the *target* of WINE is to emulate Windows, then in order to be successful, it must implement the bugs as well. So the better WINE is, the better it runs *ALL* Windows software - including the viruses and malware!
I would assume (ass + u + me) that they've done enough unit testing on the particular botnet software in question to determine its compatibility with WINE, and so long as this compatibility is sufficient, then this could be a very useful test environment. It's the botnet being studied, not Windows itself!
Another example: Windows 2000. I build data management software. I test with Windows 2000. Not because Win2000 is an example of the latest greatest from MS, but because it costs me nothing extra and runs nicely in a VM. Since the only O/S features I care about are those that are already present in Win2000, it creates a very useful test environment despite lacking many pieces present in later OS versions.
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ASL?
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ASL?
What about it? [wikipedia.org]
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"Since the *target* of WINE is to emulate Windows"
I hope I'm not missing your point, but WINE stands for "WINE Is Not an Emulator". It's a compatibility layer, and I'm sure it wouldn't keep any bugs that exist in Windows. Code that is required to run legitimate software is not a bug.
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Actually, many of the things that make windows incompatible (Microsoft's embrace and extend) are bugs of one kind or another. For instance, often, websites written to work with IE's bugs don't work on functioning browsers that don't have those bugs. I think there are similar issues with kerberos, etc. So WINE does have to implement some buggy things exactly as they are on windows. Obviously, especially with security bugs, it tries to make things work without the bugs, or at least without them affecting
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You are talking about IE, I am talking about the Windows kernel and core dlls. Yes, IE is a buggy POS, but the Windows NT kernel is extremely mature, and any bugs in it would only hinder applications.
I'm sure the researchers will be running some buggy versions of IE 6, but my comment was about WINE specifically.
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Yeah, I call bullshit that on too. If you want to study botnet behavior, which include
Re:Is that really a windows environment? (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't possibly imagine how a simulation of millions of instances of your software infecting itself would be good PR.
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I respectfully disagree...have you read any Microsoft TCO papers?
Reading them is like watching David Copperfield make a pyramid disappear.
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Only in this case, it makes lots of money disappear.
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Yeah, I call bullshit that on too. If you want to study botnet behavior, which includes studying malware and viruses, then it should be a "real" Microsoft OS. I don't think WINE counts.
I am not the biggest fan of ol' M$, but considering how interesting this research is and it's possible positive impact on the greater community (which does benefit Microsoft) you would think they would at least ask Microsoft for some licenses gratis.
Microsoft would probably be reasonable, if just for the good PR, which they sorely and always need.
True... But if they did use *real* windows instead of Wine, then the supercomputer could only virtualise a few hundred copies of Windows XP running simultaneously, or 2-3 copies if it's Vista. :E
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Microsoft would probably be reasonable, if just for the good PR, which they sorely and always need.
Hey guess what everyone?? There's millions of our OS infected with viruses because we have never been able to fix the code!
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Hey, that's great! What did you find?
Well... that it takes nanoseconds to infect our system.
Oh... and what are you doing against it?
Umm... beats me...
I would guess it wouldnt' be a problem at all (Score:5, Interesting)
I work for a university and MS is extremely generous with academic licensing. When it is for academics, like education or research, it is actually no cost. For infrastructure it does cost, but not very much. I bet if they asked MS, MS would give them all the licenses they needed for little or no cost.
For that matter, they might be eligible for volume licensing. That is where you pay a fixed yearly fee and get an unlimited use of the software it is for. Often that is based on total academic headcount, which might not be very much.
Regardless, if they asked I'd give good odds MS would figure out a way to offer them a good deal.
I'm also with you that if you want to study something, you need to run it on the actual environment. Wine is a neat idea and a neat goal, but anyone who has made use of it for more than simple testing well tell you that it has some serious issues. Not only do things not run, worse is that they'll run but not completely correct. For a user this might be fine, something works in a bit of an unexpected way, you just work around it. For research though, it could mean your conclusion is invalid.
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They don't need everything to work on WINE. They just need the some specific software like the botnets they use to behave and propagate exactly like in windows.
And that can be easily achieved.
Re:Is that really a windows environment? (Score:5, Informative)
I think you're misunderstanding what they are doing. They are not studying in-the-wild worms. They are trying to build theoretical models of botnets and how they propagate through networks--this is the equivalent of computer simulations of viral epidemics. You don't need to simulate what the virus does in a person to study how it spreads through a population.
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I think you're misunderstanding what they are doing.
I think you are correct. However, that raises the question: why use WINE?
Since they aren't relying on 'real in the wild exploits' they could model botnets and how they proagate through networks on linux or freebsd just as easily. Its really just specialized p2p and client server software to simulate botnet behaviour and spread.
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WINE is far less resource intensive, and typically runs far faster, than fully virtualized simulation software, especially because it leaves out the basically rewritten-VMS kernel and memory management of the Windows kernel in favor of Linux's own pretty zippy kernel. And the cost of buying and running a million actual Windows boxes to avoid the performance penalties of virtualization is simply infeasible.
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And the cost of buying and running a million actual Windows boxes to avoid the performance penalties of virtualization is simply infeasible.
Damn the cost man, where in the hell would you put them?
Re:Is that really a windows environment? (Score:4, Funny)
Lease time on one of the larger botnets?
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They are studying the net more than the bot. It is just simpler to create a super cheap net of bots on wine, then I am sure they have just for fun tossed in a couple virgin copies of windows to keep them fed and find out if they differ much from the wine versions. Bots are extreamly simple animals in isolation. It is the colective that gives them balls.
Inoculate them (Score:2)
Just send the username, password, and IP address of a few of the virtual machines to Nigeria or somewheres, and let the fun begin.
Besides, the idea to not really to view the infections, it's probably to monitor how the botnets behave as a horde, and deduce who controls it and what their objectives are. That's nearly impossible from observice just a few machines.
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I was wondering the very same, and I don't think it's a good idea to use this machine for exploits that use a security problem in a part of the Windows OS, but in this special case the exploit relies on third party software (in this case, flash) which can be installed in Wine just like it would be in Windows, thus making the use of Wine possible. Despite being from Adobe and Adobe products being notorious for not behaving nicely under Wine.
(seriously, when it's easier to run MS-Office on Wine, a product whe
Wine? (Score:5, Insightful)
I understand using WINE to avoid license fees, but wouldn't that potentially hinder the results of the experiment? I suppose that if they knew what functionality was needed by the botnet, they could be sure WINE provided what they needed, but it also seems like they might be able to work out a deal with MS to get a free site license for use in this test only, since it betters the computing world in general, which ultimately benefits microsoft?
Seems like a few phone calls might go a long way, if they get a hold of the right people.
-Taylor
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Wine can get Windows viruses.
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Yes, but which ones? Trojans just set to run in userspace? Is this any different than just running a million .exe's and not really infecting anyone or emulating a real infection vector?
I dont see how, say, conficker would infect these machines. The RPC exploit doesnt exist in wine.
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...Except for that they basically would have to say "Hey MS, your code is broken, so broken that we need free licenses in order to show the world how broken it is". While it is a great idea and would benefit them, all MS can see is bad press, and they want to avoid that.
I'm pretty sure that the notion of windows being susceptible to malware and viruses is probably something Microsoft has come to terms with, i really can't imagine anyone getting terribly upset. Viruses exist, someone wants to do some research, it shouldn't be that offensive of an idea.
-Taylor
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MS: "That would be 300 Million dollars please. Muahahaha!"
WINE (Score:3, Insightful)
Can a botnet run on WINE with 100% compatibility? Doesn't malware often use exactly the same kinds of tricks that WINE doesn't fully implement? This might not create an accurate picture.
Also, are they simulating network latency between nodes? Many bots take this into account.
Re:WINE (Score:5, Funny)
I hope Microsoft issues a statement that only Genuine Windows software can fully support viruses and malware in an effective fashion.
Re:WINE (Score:5, Funny)
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14 comments so far (Score:3, Funny)
and nobody yet has imagined a beowulf cluster of these? Standards are slipping!
Wine for viruses? (Score:3, Funny)
A few notes from Ron Minnich (Score:5, Informative)
I love the "life imitates xkcd" aspect.
We're well aware that Wine is not quite enough to run many windows bots. Until a year or so ago, however, there was a researcher in North Carolina running Storm under Wine, but he told me that that effort ended when Storm added a kernel driver. We've got some ideas in that area. We expect that implementing them will cost less than 1 million Vista licenses.
I was surprised to find I have become a cybersecurity expert! What I really am is an HPC expert who is using HPC tools and resources to build a system for studying cybersecurity phenomena on a millions-of-nodes scale.
Doing anything with a million of something gets interesting fast. There's a lot of interesting challenges.
Thanks
ron
Re:A few notes from Ron Minnich (Score:4, Interesting)
Well Ron, since you're here, I'm curious whether you had in fact tried to approach Microsoft for a free site license. You could explain to them that you're doing security research in a unique environment and that you'd be willing to share your results with them, etc. I could even imagine a distorted PR spin where the fact that all this major security research is being done on Windows shows that Windows is clearly the dominant operating system, blah blah...
Or if Microsoft doesn't see the value of the kind of information your research could yield, maybe someone like Symantec would be willing to buy a license and donate it to you (if that's even possible, given EULAs etc.)?
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Do you really think it would be easier to set up (and periodically reinstall) a million copies of Windows vs. telling Linux to virtualize a million instances? I mean, it would be nice to run on the real deal but there are practical issues to consider.
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Do you really think it would be easier to set up (and periodically reinstall) a million copies of Windows vs. telling Linux to virtualize a million instances?
I'm assuming they would do both. If they didn't have to individually license each Windows instance, it would be trivial to clone a million virtualized instances of a fresh Windows install. (I'm sure he's right that this would make resource management more difficult/costly than using WINE, however.)
Re:A few notes from Ron Minnich (Score:5, Informative)
The biggest limit we've found on the VM side is memory footprint of the VM guests, and it's very easy to control that with Linux; harder with Windows. We have some ideas in that area too, but it's way too early to speculate on them.
But from my point of view, it is a lot easier to do this kind of work in Linux than in Windows (I have done NT drivers in a past life), not least because of the openness of the environment. Hence, I'd rather try to find a way to make it all work on Linux.
Consider this work the beginning of the story; it's not even chapter 1, maybe it's the preface. There's a lot of work left to do. There's a lot we still don't know.
thanks
ron
What about Norton Antivirus? (Score:5, Interesting)
What about Norton Antivirus? Specifically they should run a second experiment with a simulation of 1 million systems running Norton Antivirus, and compare the results of the first test to see which has the greatest adverse effect...
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If they had a million VMs running NAV, the heat generated from CPU and disk usage would cause the data center to melt through the floor and start sinking to the center of the Earth.
Old News... (Score:5, Funny)
It is called "China".
Linux for a reason... (Score:5, Informative)
The researcher posted up above saying he's an HPC researcher, not a computer security guy, and in that context using Wine makes sense.
HPC people typically study emergent behavior -- how a lot of nodes interacting by simple rules generate complicated phenomena. The challenge is coming up with the simple rules in a form that accurately captures whatever leads to the emergent behavior you want to model. In this case, "actually being Windows so all the viruses work exactly right" is less important than getting a lot of nodes running to capture the interesting behaviors of viruses spreading through a large network.
Supercomputing is difficult on Windows. I'm at a computational physics conference now, and everything runs on Linux just because it's bloody *easier* to make everything go. I doubt many people here would even know *how* to run our models on a Windows supercomputer.
Performance issues aside, my guess is that the fellow chose Linux because the computer *already* ran Linux.
It's "The Matrix" (Score:3, Funny)
for bots. Poor little things think they're in the real world.
Dell Makes Supercomputers... (Score:3, Funny)
That's over nine thousand! (Score:2)
Wine, making it possible to run 1 million copies of a Windows environment without paying licensing fees to Microsoft
I sense a great disturbance in the arrangement of furniture in Microsoft's underground fortunes somewhere deep beneath the 'LOST' island....
Can you imagine... (Score:2)
Can you imagine... a Beowulf cluster of these!
There's one liittle problem with this, though: (Score:2)
Where will they get the one million lusers to download and spread the botnet in the first place?
Does the Big Brother "show" still exist and recruit "people"?
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Not necessarily.
You might want indeed at some point to emulate an internet choke full of unpatched machines, but other times you will probably want only a percentage of them to be this way, or you might want to study a particular vector of infection, or concurrent vectors of infection to see how they interact. The combinations are endless and so will probably be the number of WINE flavors used.
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But does Wine on Linux have the same vulnerabilities as Windows itself, and which version of Windows is it "emulating" these vulnerabilities from?
I'm sure there's a lot of malware code out there that may work well on particular versions of Windows, or instances of Windows without a particular hotfix/service pack, but this sounds like each of the 1M Wine instances will be pretty much the same...
WINE is open source, so they can patch it to be just as vulnerable as Windows is.
Yes, the notions of "progress" and "improvement" take a twisted turn when you take on the task of emulating Windows in Linux...
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... when this entity become sentient.
Sentience implies some minimal level of rationality. They're emulating the *Internet*, so I really wouldn't worry.
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That'd be why they're using Wine under Linux instead of full Windows VMs ;)