Vaughn Of The Dead Pt I: The Plan
While universally troublesome and inherently evil, there’s something exciting, even sexy, about zombie networks. The idea that somewhere out there is a global army of dormant computers, their owners blissfully unaware, which could spring to life at the whim of a bedroom hacker and coordinate DDoS attacks to take down a country’s internet presence, distribute unimaginable quantities of spam, or crack a 56-bit DES key in minutes – it’s the stuff of science fiction. Only it isn’t, and the Storm botnet is testament.
Many of us grey-hat hackers fantasise about controlling such power but don’t have the time, skills, lawyers or lack of moral-fibre to do anything about it. So what’s the next best thing? Well that would be to play with somebody else’s illegal toy.
The first step is to get hold of the worm. You’d think it would be easy enough to get hold of a program whose primary goal is to spread to the ends of the earth, but it’s actually trickier than you might imagine to come by a sample or network that isn’t already tainted by the holy paws of the antivirus companies of the world. So rather than giving myself a headache, I plan to let the worms do the work and wait for them to come to me.
In the coming days, I’ll be setting up a honeypot and crossing my fingers. I have promised to analyse and, if necessary, publicly humiliate any interesting malware that comes my way. With a little skill and a lot of luck, I may even find myself to be the proud owner of a zombie, albeit a neutered one.
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