full-disclosure - Re: Oh Yeah, botnet communications

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Message-ID: <60231.1235107271@turing-police.cc.vt.edu>
Date: Fri, 20 Feb 2009 00:21:11 -0500
From: Valdis.Kletnieks@...edu
To: T Biehn <tbiehn@...il.com>
Cc: full-disclosure <Full-Disclosure@...ts.grok.org.uk>
Subject: Re: Oh Yeah, botnet communications

On Thu, 19 Feb 2009 23:38:37 EST, T Biehn said:

> God Valdis,
> Dont concentrate on the mundane, the core issue is the unpredictable nature
> of it.
> You have them all coordinate reading the news at 12:00 AM GMT.
> You build some silly algorithm that ensures they pick the right article.

Right, so now you need this insanely complicated system to make sure that you
get the right article at midnight, even if you have a race condition or you're
getting an old copy because of a caching proxy in the path or if they hit
different boxes on a load balancer and the articles update a few seconds apart,
and then make sure they all pick the "right" article - which means they need to
*agree* on the right article without knowing for sure what article the *other*
bots are looking at.  And that also means that the botnet owner (or at least
a system they have) has to *also* be online so it can also check CNN and figure
out what domain to register - which sucks if Godaddy just put up the "Down for
3 hours due to unexpected system problem" sign or any of a zillion other failure
modes in trying to register that next domain in real time.  You can't register
the next 3-4 day's worth of domains ahead of time and make sure they went
live.

Lots of failure modes there.

Or you can just hash the damned clock once an hour, which seems to be quite
sufficient to keep the average botnet running.

*THAT* is why they don't base it off a news RSS feed - all these mundane issues
make it *harder*.  You wanna do it the hard way that has more ways to fail and
sprout bugs, be my guest.  Most of the coders out there prefer something
just a bit simpler.

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