GRC DDoS

If you're interested at all in hackers, their subculture and the kind of espionage that goes into battling them, then read this article by William Gibson of grc.com where he does a post-mortem of a Distributed Denial of Service attack on his site. Long read, but worth it. via Slashdot

William Is The Cyberpunk Gibson...

...the programmer Gibson is Steve.

Thanks for the link! I hadn't checked out grc.com in a while - since Steve likes to write everything in assembly it's usually a pretty long wait between updates - but when he's got something new to show it's almost always interesting...

Whoops...

Crossed wires.

Cable Bots

All of this kind of stuff happens because having a personal computer on a network creates several kinds of doors to that computer and it seems that operating systems do their best to hide any notion of those doors from their users. Until there is simplification and education of these issues for PC owners, Cable Bots will probably rule the earth.

He mentions detecting a "Bot" by monitoring IRC traffic, but what about virus scanning software? And how do the Bots get on these systems? Are they from a downloaded .exe? Or an ActiveX control? Isn't detecting the Bot a better way to solve the problem than lobotomizing the WinSock implementation?

Just think if the bot contained some rendering software too. Someone could render Toy Story faster than Pixar.