, 2006-04-18
Botnets are a major source of evil on the Internet, from spam, phishing attacks, virus propagation and denial-of-service attacks to the stealing of financial information and other illegal activity. Does disbanding them raise legal and ethical implications?
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"Source" of evil?
2006-04-18
Matthew Murphy (1 replies)
Matthew Murphy (1 replies)
Stop the bots
2006-04-18
Anonymous (4 replies)
Anonymous (4 replies)
Re: Stop the bots
2006-04-18
Anonymous (1 replies)
Anonymous (1 replies)
This comparison of botnets and SkyNet reminded me of an old question that is not yet, I think, around:
how do you make the difference between a program that is "sincerely" faulty and one that is malicious as long as they depend on the same "bug" (which can be seen as a "functionality" in the case of the malicious program, a.k.a. virus/Trojan)?
In the case of this article, this would apply to the anti-botnet, which are basically (correct me if I'm wrong) virus programs that try to correct the bad effects of other exploits. That reminds me of this virus that was correcting the effects of another virus (in the middle of a war between hacker gangs ... it's funny how changes can be driven by human behaviour, good as well as bad).
To be clear about all that, you'd have to talk about the "intention" of the programmer, which is clearly not an easy thing (attaching labels on programs wouldn't necessary work as programmers could lie about their intention, etc.).
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Link to this comment: http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/columns/398/33530#33530