Following on from the previous post I have realized that the present botnet threat has become rather scary. Quite apart from bringing a country to its knees they can be used for the rather more mundane purpose of stealing credit-card numbers and passwords off our computers. Seemingly they are rapidly becoming the tools of big business (in the cybergangsterdom sense). The Guardian describes them as a pandemic. Of course, in themselves they are not dangerous, as a serious infectious disease rampantly out of control is, but because of what we use our computers for nowadays, they are.
Scott Berinato writes in Attack of the bots in Wired Magazine about the day that ten million blogs and online communities disappeared because of a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDos) that was originally directed at one particular blog but that then turned its attention onto the whole blogging community of which that blog was a part. (The Guardian article also covers this case.)
Berinato writes: “The operational software, known as command and control, or C&C, resides on a remote server. Think of a botnet as a terrorist sleeper cell: Its members lurk silently within ordinary desktop computers, inert and undetected, until C&C issues orders to strike.”
The name given to the person who controls the botnet is a bot herder, as if the bots were sheep, but sometimes they are referred to as swarms, as if they were bees, and sometimes as an army, as if they were soldiers. The implication of this terminology appears to be that they all move in a co-ordinated way, under a central command. Descriptions of a botnet come associated with a bewildering number of terms that could also feature in this blog – keylogging, phishing (and phishees), packets, spyware, malware, worms, trojan horses, backdoors, IRC, and zombie computers, to name but a few.
If you want to know more go to Wikipedia and follow up some of the links.
ETYM
Bot means Robot, as in googlebot (see my previous Chatbot post). A robot is centrally controlled just as a botnet is.
The Net usually refers to the internet.
Net has many other meanings also. (See yourdictionary.com) Interestingly, yourdictionary says that when used as a verb it means: “To gain possession of, especially after a struggle or chase”. Similar to what a botnet does, I guess.
