Last summer, Hollywood issued a warning--a new age would begin and a new generation would be born.
How on the mark that was, both on and off the cinema seat. The 21st-century Hollywood rendition of Isaac Asimov's I, Robot only went as far as the physical destruction caused by robots.
At about the same time I, Robot came to our screens, hackers were already about to launch a robotic attack of the virtual kind--using bundles of code known as bots to exert control over the cyberworld.
Each day, as computer users unassumingly logged on, more and more bots gained control, multiplying from 2000 monitored bots a day (as measured by Symantec at the end of 2003) to an average of 30,000 this past June. (Spikes of 75,000 were also measured during this period.)
Unlike Asimov's NS5 (the robot that, apart from one AI being, assumed a mass personality) bots come in many different individual forms. Like the NS5 though, network bots do have power in numbers.
What are they?
The bots that are terrorising us today are actually programs, and they've been around for quite a while in a much more benign form. The first bots were used to create virtual opponents for video games or to spider Web sites. The first bot--the Eggdrop bot--was written in 1993 to help form party lines on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) lines.
As bots became more sophisticated, they began to take on more sinister roles in the hands of some creators. Now they can be secretly installed on a target system, and once there, an unauthorised user can take control of the system, giving out malicious directions for one or a whole group of bots the controller may have set up.
They have recently been known to launch viral attacks, extort finances from companies, or send spam from your machine, without the user even being aware they are there. Bot business has suddenly come to mean big money. In the same sort of place that Internet porn, fake Rolex watches, and promises of cheap Viagra lurk, you can find a black market for bad bots.
According to Symantec security response team senior director Vincent Weafer, bots hidden on your machine can be put up to a range of dirty deeds netting their creators up to AU$100 (AU$1 is approximately US$0.8) an hour. Individual bots can disable virus protection and allow the nasties in, or armies of bots can make their way past the front line, using sheer force to flood a system and bring a business--particularly an online operator--down. Many of these bot sources can be found over the Internet, proferring their services to one and all.
"The [malicious] motivation between the launch of bot attacks can vary between profit and distortion," Weafer says. The controller of a bot can say 'I am going to do a Dedicated Denial of Service [DDoS] attack on you unless you pay me money'. One sector where this scam is often used is with online gambling sites.
"Bots are also certainly seen as a tool for the relay of spam, or they can be used to gain credit card information and to store illegal material on people's machines... bots really are dangerous because they can use machines for so many different purposes. In many cases bot networks themselves are available for rent at a per-hour amount. This depends on the number of machines or bandwidth types. One we pulled off had about 220 bots that had been sold for AU$800 a week, another had bots on 9000 machines. The average network amount is 2.5 cents per bot week. Rental is very low so it makes sense to use bots for extortion or for spamming," he adds.
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