From: lists at lowkeysoft.com (Steele)
Subject: Re: Know Your Enemy: Tracking
	Botnets	(ThorstenHolz)

Valdis.Kletnieks@...edu wrote:

> Notice that often, a "nothing new" paper can still be important just due to
> readability by an audience other than the technical geeks.  For example, it's
> been *years* since "Smashing the stack for fun and profit" made it all clear
> for the bitheads among us - but would you give it to your upper management as
> justification for a project?  No, you'd need to find a white paper that had
> "nothing new" in it, but which stated it in a way that the threat becomes clear
> even to a manager.  And writing something that's accessible by a *novice*
> sysadmin that has maybe a year or two experience is an entirely different skill....

Whether or not this is anything new, Valdis pretty much hit the nail on 
the head right there. Botnets, whether ircbots, spambots, proxybots or 
whatever have been around for years now. The problem is no one with the 
power to do anything knows enough to give a damn. These are the kind of 
papers we need floating around out there for some lowly tech at an ISP 
to be able to bring to their boss. Imagine if Comcast or Roadrunner or 
(insert big Inet company here) actually took the time to create a small 
team to analyze their traffic for even the most basic of bot giveaways 
and started cleaning up their network.

For those of us "in the know" IRCbots are the fodder of the bot and 
zombie world. You can't download a simple britney spears(or whatever the 
kids are into nowadays) naked screensaver off Usenet without running 
into an ircbot that dies about 24 hours later. And yet, start talking 
about the basics of how they work or what they do to some higher up and 
watch their eyes glaze over.

Until we can get those idiots to be more comfortable with the basics of 
what these networks are, they're never going to be taken seriously.

Like I said IRCbot's are pretty much fodder. Some of the better web 
based or p2p nets are a lot harder to come across and even harder to 
gain access to. And these suckers aren't being run by some bored teen 
with nothing better to do. They're run with a purpose and an 
organization behind them. Some of the data I've retrieved off the 
control servers had me pretty nervous.  A couple million dollars worth 
of bank account info is nothing to scoff at. That money has got to be 
going somewhere and somehow I don't think it's for taking the kids to 
Disneyland.

Paper I released back in October that shows another type of network.
Not nearly as in depth :) you guys win :)
http://lowkeysoft.com/proxy/

</rant mode>

Sorry bout that :)
I only skimmed the paper, but over all I thought it was pretty good. I 
would have liked to see a bit more info on those DNS bots, still haven't 
run across one of those yet. And I don't suppose you guys kept track of 
the Average TTL of these nets? It was rare for me to find one that 
didn't die before I had the chance to shut it down.

-steele out

BTW: Due to "hardware problems" I've had to drop out of the game for a 
couple months. should be up and running again by the end of this month. 
To the few people I was talking to before I disappeared, I lost your 
email addresses during the hardware issues :) hit me up :)

----------------------
LowKeysoft.com
-Tricking the tricksters
steele.lowkey[at]gmail.com

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