Fergie's Tech Blog

Bad Idea of The Week: 'Friendly Botnets'

Mason Inman writes on NewScientistTech:

Beating the "botnets" – armies of infected computers used to attack websites – requires borrowing tactics from the bad guys, say computer security researchers.

A team at the University of Washington, US, want to marshal swarms of good computers to neutralise the bad ones. They say their plan would be cheap to implement and could cope with botnets of any size.

Current countermeasures are being outstripped by the growing size of botnets, says the Washington team, but assembling swarms of good computers in defense could render DDoS attacks obsolete.

Their system, called Phalanx, uses its own large network of computers to shield the protected server. Instead of the server being accessed directly, all information must pass through the swarm of "mailbox" computers.

A paper on Phalanx was presented at the USENIX symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, held last week in San Francisco, US.

posted by Fergie @ 4/22/2008 01:13:00 PM