Hello fellow COMM 245 bloggers, my name is Jeffrey Hertzberg and I’m from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I’m currently a sophomore planning on becoming a computer science major. I’m an officer on the Rubik’s Cube club here at Cornell and also a brother of the Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity. I enjoy web designing/developing/graphic designing/programming/as well as many other computer related activities. I look forward to my first semester at Cornell as a sophomore and reading everyone’s blogs here in COMM 245 RED.
I'm interested in the growth of botnets over the past few years and the targets chosen. The word botnet refers to a group of bots, which run autonomously and remotely. These bots, often referred to as "zombies" are usually under the control of individuals with malicious intent. They are compromised computers(possibly any one of you reading this blog) that have been infected by malicious code. They are commonly used in a variety of internet attacks and are often overlooked as a machine can be executing attacks without it's actual owner ever being aware. There are estimates that over 1/4 of all computers connected to the internet are zombies in a botnet somewhere. It somewhat perturbs me that my computer could be used as a part of a massive distributed denial of service attack while I remain completely unaware. I have read about several large attacks carried out against botnets, but am interested in seeing how they will be prevented in the future.
As far as online spaces go, I would have to describe botnets in their own category. I would best describe them as largescale internet crime. Information security is somewhat of a passion of mine, and I find it intriguing as to the type of people who create and mastermind these large botnets that exist around the internet. Creating a gargantuan following of zombie computers to control can hardly be an easy task and is most likely an interesting process. Hopefully the chance will arise to research this topic more throughout the semester and keep you fellow bloggers updated.
1 comment:
I was actually going to write a similar post, but I decided against it. To me, botnets didn't seem relevant to what we are studying, since our concern is the effects of using technology as a medium for communication. However, I'm glad you actually found a connection. Botnets are pretty interesting as they represent a person <-> computer interaction, instead of the person <-> computer <-> person that we seem to be seeing in class. It would be interesting to know what's going on in the mind of the master. On a side note, as far as I know, many masterminds behind botnets use IRC to coordinate attacks. Once computers are compromised, they are often directed to an IRC channel, serving as the communication means between master and slave. It's almost the same case for exploited machines serving pirated software in IRC. Consequently, I think this might even fit under synchronous chat.
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