Interwebology Musings on the Internet and Society

Bot That’s Another Story

There's a secret global army. A malevolent force hidden within multinational corporations, government agencies and even our own homes. The troops are well camouflaged, receiving and executing their master's commands without detection.

What is this evil legion? Well, it's millions and millions of compromised computers — some estimate up to a quarter of all PCs — which are participants in huge networks known as "botnets". What do they want from us? That one's easy: they want our money. And they make a grab for it with spam emails, credit card fraud and other scams.

It wasn't always this way. Early computer viruses were written solely to prove that their author was very clever. They were often whimsical, displaying poems or cryptic messages on the screen, but sometimes destructive — erasing the user's hard drive. For example, the Michaelangelo virus (discovered in 1991) laid dormant until the Renaissance artist's birthday on March 6, then proceeded to trash all the hapless user's files.

Photo by squacco

Hackers have matured and instead of committing pranks with no tangible benefit to themselves, have got into bed with organised crime. The paradox is that while their exploits have a financial motivation — and attract a lot more attention from law enforcement — they're actually less annoying. What would you rather have, all your data erased or lots of spam? Having said that, the internet has made them much more rampant and we must now hide behind anti-virus software, personal firewalls, spyware scanners and automatic security-hole patchers.

Anyway, back to the botnets. This is how it works: the botnet commanders, with pinky raised to their lips and one eyebrow arched, rent out infected machines by the thousand to any spammers and scammers willing to pay. The renters can then log the user's keystrokes, send out spam, hold websites to ransom and do pretty much anything else they feel like with the infected computer.

In March 2009 the BBC got in on the act and, as part of a report into the phenomenon, bought its own network of 22,000 machines from hackers in Russia and the Ukraine. The software controlling the botnet wasn't what you would expect from movie portrayals: no screens of cryptic text commands or flying through abstract 3D worlds made of circuit boards. No, it was just a slick graphical interface in the same vein as the applications you use everyday. The Beeb researchers sent out 10,000 spam emails  (to their own accounts) and brought a volunteer website to its knees my sending scores of simultaneous requests — which is how hackers hold real websites to ransom.

Botnets sound like fantasy, but they're real, and aren't going anywhere fast. Which is a shame, because it's neither difficult nor expensive to protect yourself. At the moment if you patch your software, update your antivirus, and run a firewall you're pretty safe. But, like any kind of crime, when one opportuntity is closed down the crooks don't just give up and go home, sighing "it's a fair cop, guvnor." No, they find another way in. And that we do have to watch out for.