Botnets, Zombies, and Remote Control Attacks in United States
Botnets, Zombies, and Remote Control Attacks
Overview of Botnets, Zombies, and Remote Control Attacks in relation to cyber crime: [1] Bot programs were initially created in the early 1990s by Internet Relay Chat (IRC) users to provide automated responses while they were away from their computers, to attack and defend control of IRC channels, as well as to perform other tasks. By 1999, various tools such as Trinoo, Tribal Flood Network, Stacheldraht, and Shaft were developed to engage in distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks, often against IRC servers. In 2000, these DDOS tools were merged with worms and rootkits in order to automate the rapid compromise of systems used to launch attacks. By 2002, the IRC control functionality of the original bots was merged with these tools, and bots became a general purpose platform for compromising systems, taking control of them, and using them for a variety of tasks beyond DDOS. The DDOS capability became less common as bots began to be used by criminals for economic gain.
Resources
Notes and References
- By James Lippard
See Also
- Types of Cybercrime
- Cybercriminal
Further Reading
Abad, C. (2005). The economy of phishing. First Monday, 10(9). Web page, http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_9/abad/index.html; Ba?cher, P., Holz, T., Ko?tter, M., & Wicherski, G. (2005). Know your enemy: Tracking botnets. Honeynet Project. Available at http://www.honeynet.org/papers/bots/; Berinato, S. (2007, September). Inside the global hacking service economy. CSO, pp. 20–32. Available at http://www.cio.com/article/135500; Dittrich, D. (2005, March). Evolution: Rise of the bots. Information Security Web page, http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/tip/ 1,289483,sid14_gci1068914,00.html; Federal Bureau of Investigation. (2007, June 13). Over 1 million potential victims of botnet cyber crime. FBI Web page http:// www.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel07/botnet061307.htm; Grizzard, J.B., et al. (April, 2007). Peer-to-peer botnets: Overview and case study. HotBots ’07 conference paper. Available at http://www.usenix.org/events/hotbots07/tech/full_papers/grizzard/grizzard_html; Krebs, B. (2006, March 21) Bringing botnets out of the shadows. Washingtonpost.com Web page. Available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/ 03/21/AR2006032100279.html; Menezes, J. (2007, July 25)Why we’re losing the botnet battle. Network World Web page. Available at http://www.networkworld.com/news/ 2007/072507-why-were-losing-the-botnet.html.