Sophisticated peer-to-peer (P2P) botnets like Storm that have no centralized command and control architecture have frustrated researchers because they're tough to dismantle. But a group of European researchers has come up with a way to disrupt these stealthy botnets -- by “polluting” them.
The researchers, from the University of Mannheim and the Institut Eurecom, recently infiltrated Storm to test out a method they came up with of analyzing and disrupting P2P botnets. Their technique is a spinoff of traditional botnet tracking, but with a twist: it not only entails capturing bot binaries and infiltrating the P2P network, but it also exploits weaknesses in the botnet’s P2P protocol to inject “polluted” content into the botnet to disrupt communication among the bots, as well as to study them more closely. The researchers tested their pollution method out on Storm -- and it worked. They presented their research this month at Usenix.
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This is an awesome idea. But it won't be long until botnets are designed to protect their traffic a bit better - cat & mouse.
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