Researchers Infiltrate Denial of Service Networks

Security researchers have been infiltrating denial of service ‘botnets’ in order to study a remarkably affective Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) technique. As a part of his work for the Honeynet Research Alliance, Bill McCarty, an associate professor of Web and information technology at Azusa Pacific University in Southern California, deployed a series of vulnerable Windows based systems on the Internet. These “honeypots” were compromised by Internet worms and malicious hackers over and over, and led McCarty on a whirlwind tour through a series of sophisticated DDoS networks, one after the other. “You put up a honeypot and it gets knocked over… again and again and again,” he told ZDNet Australia. Once his honeypot had been compromised, it joined what’s called a botnet, or bot network. These networks are used by malicious hackers to conduct denial of service attacks by issuing single commands to huge numbers of systems through internet relay chat commands. Full Story