Single Points of Internet 0wnership

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

Forwarded from: Aj Effin Reznor <aj () reznor com>

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~nweaver/0wn2.html

-aj.

by Nicholas Weaver

"Any attacker who can control 100,000 machines is a major force on the
internet, while someone with a million or more is currently
unstoppable: able to launch massively diffuse DDOS attacks, perform
needle in a hayfield searches, and commit all sorts of other mayhem.
We already understand how worms could be used to gain control of so
many machines. Yet the recent revelation that Brilliant Digital Media
has bundled a small trojan with KaZaA has underscored another means by
which an attacker could gain control of so many machines: poorly
secured automatic updaters. If an attacker can distribute his own code
as an update, he can take control of millions of machines.

Brilliant Digital plans to create Altnet, a distributed, "secure"
network of clients to harness the unused storage, bandwidth, and
computation residing on the machines of users across the country, in a
manner which prevents the clients from altering or even reading the
information. An entertaining if horribly flawed business model [1],
except for the means they have selected to build their network."



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