Malicious Bots | An Inside Look Into The Cyber Criminal Underground Of The Internet

In the beginning, bots, short for “robots,” were neutral entities and non-malicious. Windows Internet worms entered the wild in the late 1990s, leading to the automation of malicious code. Bots emerged from this landscape. The term “botnets” itself actually appears to have been coined from “robot networks.” The word “robot” has a Czech derivation from the word “robotovat,” which means “to work.” This is also very similar to the Russian word “rabotat,” which has the same meaning. When formed into groupings of bots, or botnets (networks or groupings of bot-infected computers), the aggregate resources are quite powerful. Botnet, therefore, is an apt definition: bots are highly adaptable worker bees that do their master’s bidding over a broad “net”—in the case of bots, scattered throughout the global Internet.

Thus, there are both “good bots” and “bad bots”—it simply depends on how the bots are being used. Good bots are employed for various legitimate functions but have generally been completely overshadowed by their bad bot counterparts. This book is about the latter­, which is to say that a bot is not “bad” or “illegal” in and of itself, only in how it is used.

In many respects, Trojan horse programs (or Trojans), which are malicious computer programs that do not replicate, marked the dawn of criminal operations using malicious code. …

Contents

  • Introduction to Bots…
  • Thr34t Security Krew and the TK Worm…
  • Demonstration: How a Hacker Launches a Botnet Attack …
  • Botnets and the eCrime Cycle: The iSIGHT Partners’ Approach…
  • Technical Introduction to Bots…
  • Mitigation …
  • Concluding Thoughts…
  • Glossary …
  • Bibliography…
  • Index …

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Happy learning!

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