I just read an article from CNET on how "Skype could provide botnet controls", with which I totally disagree. Skype and VoIP communications can actually provide botner herders
with the opportunity to communicate, compared to acting as a platform
for malicious attacks.
And old fashioned DDoS attacks the way we know
them work damn well as a concept. Years ago, quite some :) linux boxes
worming was on the rise the Honeynet Project was conducting outstanding research
to build awareness on this fact. These days, with the penetration of
broadband, and the thousands of users with ISP like bandwidth make the
need to look for bandwidht irrelevant. Instead of breaching into core
routers and looking for bandwidth, that DDoS attack power is gathered
through the collective breaching of thousands of hundreds unprotected,
unaware or naive end users.
Botnet communications are evolving each time
a new disrupting technology pops up, on the other hand, botnet herders
are having trouble in finding out the exact number of their botnet due
to lack of server capacity, and as I've once mentioned in my Malware - future trends
research, encryption seems to be the logical move.
And the trade off
would eventually be the delays of communication given the size of the
botnet and the encryption approaches of course. Bots that lack the
weakness of idleness on public IRC servers are already "talking" and
trying to act as legit as possible, my point is that the bigger a botnet
gets, the harder is to maintain it, that's logical, and it's good news
for everyone, until someone standardize a possible communication
protocol.
Scary thoughts, but a simple botnet/malware communication
protocol could for instance cause a lot of troubles for everyone. Is
centralization of botnets a good thing for the industry in respect to
tracking them, and how would things evolve? Skype is totally out of the
question from my point of view, or is it not?
Some nice insights on botnet communications can be found at :
The Zombie Roundup: Understanding, Detecting, and Disrupting Botnets
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security,information security,malware,botnets,skype
