West Side Cyberstory

Who could have conceived this (other than maybe Leonardo DaVinci) hundreds of years ago? The bots are fighting.

Jose Nazario stopped by today; he’s Arbor Networks’ resident botnet guru and he shared a cool anecdote about some bot-on-bot crime as he put it. Apparently, the lovelies behind the Storm worm are trying to put rival spammers–the guys behind the Warezov/Stration family of spam worms–out of business with a series of DDoS attacks.

Dark Reading has more:

More botnet-on-botnet turf wars have erupted -- and intensified -- over the past few months....

Aside from the distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks they launch against one another to disrupt their operations (like the recent DDOS battles between the Storm and Stration botnets), they also are constantly trying to hijack bots from one another. "Stealing is easier than building [out] one," says Danny McPherson, chief research officer for Arbor Networks, who tracks botnet activity.

But the savvier botnets go the extra mile to protect their captor capital: Some actually "secure" the bot machines they have infected so no other botnets can steal them or utilize them, too.

It appears that Oba Saint Stanley Tookie Williams wouldn't even be allowed to join a gang today - he wouldn't have sufficient computer skills.

botnet

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