subject: If You Were A Hacker How Would You Create The Perfect Botnet? [print this page] No matter how much we may be disgusted by a criminal lifestyle, we as the public always find the life of an outlaw fascinating. We wonder how people like that can live with the pressure that the criminal lifestyle entails. Luckily with a computer, you do not have to put your freedom on the line when you want to see how an online criminal does something. You can just set up some sort of simulation and lay out the attack yourself. There are many places on the web where you can see how to do this. So, just put yourself in the shoes of a criminal hacker for a couple of hours. How would you set up your attack? How would you be able to get the resources that you need to get the attack off of the ground? In this article we will talk about some of the ways that you might think about setting up an attack if you were an online criminal.
The first step
The first thing that you need to think about is what you are going to use to attract your victims. And what attack are you doing exactly? Are you going to try to use an exploit to get a piece of malware on the victim's computer to set up the botnet? Or are you going to set up a phising web site to try and trick victims into giving up their credit card number and downloading the botnet program to their computer from that site? For right now let's say that we are going to set up a phising web site. We are going to make it look like a banking web site.
The set up
This banking web site of ours will perform two functions. It will get people to put their username and password into two fields. And it will tell the people that there is a problem with their computer and they need to download a program to fix it. This program that we want them to download is actually making their computer a zombie node on our botnet. So now that we have that all set up, there is one more thing that we now need. The victims.
Where to find the victims?
We have all of the technical things that we need to set up the attack with. Now we have to find the victims. This is where our social engineering skills come into play. We need to be able to convince people that the link leads to their bank web site. So we go ona social networking site and send out a link to all of our followers on a fake account that we set up earlier. The link is a warning and it tells people to be on the lookout. They send the link to their friends and they send it to theirs. Now that the link is in everyone's hands, we can wait for some people to fall victim to our attack.
As you see, even though the media tries to show every hacker as a super genius, that is not the case. It is not hard to set up an attack like this. And the fact that it is not hard makes it even more dangerous.
If You Were A Hacker How Would You Create The Perfect Botnet?
