Security Incidents mailing list archives

Re: Phatbox: Media Hype? Scare Tactics?


From: Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu
Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2004 15:24:34 -0500

On Wed, 17 Mar 2004 13:28:20 EST, Joe Stewart <jstewart () lurhq com>  said:

I have heard reports that lead me to believe the current number of 
infections may indeed be in the low hundreds of thousands. The question 
I would pose is; are those hundreds of thousands infected hosts 
actually part of the botnet at any given time? The WASTE P2P protocol 
the botnet uses is not built for large numbers of peers. I did connect 
to some of the clients and examine the traffic passing through the node 
and found about 1000 unique nicknames in about an hour or so. So, even 
though total infections may be high, the actual number of bots 
available to the owner at any one time is still in question in my mind.

Which is worse - one black hat with 100K bots at their disposal, or
100 black hats with 1K bots each?

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