“Botnet Attack and Analysis” Tynan Wilk

A short paper which discusses the repeated theme of invading IRC chat rooms as a way of attack and detecting potential and existing botnets. The author provides a sample HTTP Get request and details on how to utilize Google as a detection mechanism for discovering vulnerable targets that are likely to become zombies in the future. The paper reaches it’s climax with the author discussing a brief synopsis of what exactly happened upon entry into an IRC chat room in which he had the rare chance to actually speak with one of the “Herders” in person. The herder was actually not threatened at all by the presence of the author(In the sense that he was annoyed rather than alarmed), and banned him leaving him with the statement that the author was a rare and lucky case not to have been infected but that new attacks were being developed so that one day this luck would eventually fade if the author did not keep up with the technology gap between intruder and victim. Quite a few themes seem to be reoccurring in these papers, none of them seem to be indicative of a positive outlook for the future of network security.