North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Botnet pointer

  • From: Gadi Evron
  • Date: Mon Dec 20 17:18:57 2004


"bot": derivative of "robot". An application on an infected computer used for orchestrated attacks or for distributed generation of spam, often distributed in or with viruses or other malware. Similar to "zombie", which is an older usage specific to distributed denial of service attacks.
I believe calling them "bots", although correct, is a mistake. "drones" or "zombies" or whatever "shark" ( *wink* :) ) you like would probably work. How else are we going to be able to tell the difference from real bots? I.e. those bots that people run legitimately, meaning not by the AUP of the service the bots run on but rather by the approval of the machine administrator/operator.

This is not to say these bots must be non-abusive, but to distinguish them from the.. erm.. drones! :)

"botnet": a set of bots that may be controlled as a single service, and which may be leased or sold to a user as a unit.
I believe that a "distributed (centrally controlled) network of <insert word>" would serve us best. Under "normal"/root conditions, you can make a program do whatever you want for it to do, on a Windows machine. So what it serves for is irrelevant if we want to be abstract.

Gadi.