nanog mailing list archives

Re: How should ISPs notify customers about Bots (Was Re: DNS Hijacking


From: Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu
Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2007 13:52:04 -0400

On Tue, 24 Jul 2007 12:00:40 CDT, Joe Greco said:

Hardly unexpected.  The continuing evolution is likely to be pretty 
scary.  Disposables are nice, but the trouble and slowness in seeding 
makes them less valuable.  I'm expecting that we'll see 
compartmentalized bots, where each bot has a small number of neighbors,
a pseudo-scripting command language, extensible communication ABI to 
facilitate the latest in detection avoidance, and some basic logic to 
seed/pick neighbors that aren't local.  Build in some strong 
encryption, have them each repeat the encrypted orders to their 
neighbors, and you have a structure that would be exceedingly 
difficult to deal with.

Considering how long ago that sort of model was proposed, it is actually
remarkable that it doesn't seem to have been perfected by now, and that
we're still blocking IRC.

Obviously, botnet authors are lazy, and not motivated to do all that work to do
all that extra stuff, when we're still focusing on the *last* generation of
"use a well-known IRC net for C&C" bots, and haven't really address the
*current* "use a hijacked host running a private IRC net" bots yet.

Equally likely - somebody's already written the code, but is waiting for when
it is actually *needed* before deploying.  If you're the leading side of an
arms race, tipping your hand regarding the next escalation is usually a bad
idea....

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