BotNet News

A botnet is a collection of compromised computers or Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, infected with malware and controlled remotely by the criminals behind it. The cybercriminals can rent or sell the botnet to others for various purposes like DDoS attacks, spamming, or stealing online credentials.

Bots were originally developed to make time-consuming tasks easier for hackers and other malicious actors, like proctoring chatrooms to eject people who use inappropriate language or steal passwords. Eventually, cybercriminals began to use them for more serious crimes like sabotaging online services or taking down websites with DDoS attacks.

Today, botnets can be made of anything from traditional computers to IoT devices and are sold on dark web marketplaces for use by the hacker community. Typically, they infect the target device through exploitation of vulnerabilities in websites or Trojan horse malware. Once the device is infected, it will self-propagate by recruiting other hardware devices on the network to become part of the botnet.

Traditionally, bots connect to a central command and control (C2) server using resources like IRC channels or domains that obfuscate the traffic. This client-server model makes it efficient for the bot herder to update instructions for the botnet. However, the C2 servers are one of many points that can be disrupted, causing the botnet to stop functioning.

Newer bots operate with P2P models that do not rely on centralized servers. Instead, they have a list of other infected bots to communicate with and share instructions. This architecture obfuscates the bot herder’s identity and allows for more resilient and hard to detect networks.