Businesses, governments and internet service providers
face dangerous new network disruption and malware attacks
frombotnetsbased onpeer-to-peer
technology(P2P) instead of the more common
hierarchical structure.
Eugene Kaspersky, CEO of
Kaspersky Laboratories, the
Russian antivirus company that identified the new method, said the
new method had already succeeded in strangling internet
communications in Krasnodar and Astrakhan for several weeks. "We do
not know who was behind these attacks," he said. "It may have been
a test."
Alex Gostev, senior virus analyst at Kaspersky, said the P2P
nature of the new botnet meant that each infected machine needed to
know only its neighbours. An instruction to activate the botnet
could be sent to any of the machines in the network which would
then propagate from machine to machine to build an attack.
"Not having a central controller makes it very difficult to find
the originating machine," he said. He said it took a very long time
to identify all the infected machines and hence to defend against
the attack. "The ISPs receive these seemingly random packets and
there is no constant source of attack, which means that you cannot
develop a rule to filter them," he said.
Gostev said botnets have become very easy to use and a thriving
underground market has developed for anyone who wants to hire
one.
However, they said the trend among financially motivated
attackers was to use smaller botnets. "This lets them keep under
the radar so attacks are harder to detect," Kaspersky said.
Gostev said such attacks could be very subtle and highly
targeted. In one case, a business journalist received an e-mail
tip-off that an oil and gas company was in trouble, that the CEO
had been arrested and the prosecutors were going to levy massive
fines. When he checked the firm's website, he found it was
down.
Further checking revealed that the tip-off was fake. The
attackers had hoped to make money by selling shares they did not
own in the oil firm, buying them for delivery when the price fell
as a result of the bad news story being published.