How Does a Botnet Work?
Imagine your laptop, smart phone, or IoT device working behind the scenes without your knowledge to perform tasks on command from someone you never met. That’s what happens when a computer or device is infected with bot malware, which allows threat actors to control the devices remotely without their owners’ knowledge or consent. Botnets are responsible for some of the most damaging cyberattacks in history and are a significant risk to cybersecurity. Understanding how they work, what they do, and how to protect against them is essential for protecting enterprise data, networks, and systems.
Threat actors use botnets to attack everything from phishing websites to stealing critical login credentials. They also leverage them for attacks such as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), spamming, click fraud, and stealing financial information. Some state-sponsored botnets are even deployed as cyber weapons in warfare scenarios and can infiltrate government or military networks, posing national security risks.
When a device is infected with bot malware, the bot collects and sends malicious commands to other devices on the network to carry out the attacker’s instructions. The bots communicate with each other using various methods, ranging from the centralized client-server model to peer-to-peer (P2P) models. The centralized server model has its drawbacks, especially when a bot herder’s C&C servers are discovered and disabled.
P2P bots work by discreetly probing random IP addresses until they find another infected machine that they can connect to and share instructions with. This avoids reliance on a single server and makes botnets harder to detect.