VeriSign, the company that administers the .com top level domain, has warned that botnets are growing at such a rate that there is an increasing risk of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack against them effectively shutting down the Internet. They state in a report on ZDNet that they are currently fending off DoS attacks launched from BotNets by increasing bandwidth and are aiming on improving filtering of malicious traffic. DoS attacks are difficult to trace by there very nature, but it’s believed that many of them are controlled by groups in Russia, China and Romania.
This report comes after an earlier report on Ryan Naraine’s Zero Day blog that a New Zealand computer scientist, Peter Gutman, claimed that the Storm botnet is potentially large enough to be one of the 10 largest supercomputers. His calculations on the full disclosure site Insecure.org, actually estimate that the combined computing resource is better than any of the top 10 supercomputers as reported on the Top 500 Supercomputing Sites.
Technically a supercomputer has a much more sophisticated functionality than a botnet, so they are not yet directly comparably on computing power. But it’s a frightening thought that the same distributed network of infected computers could be put to some much more malicious uses than just DoS attacks and SPAM.
For more information on the Storm worm, check out the Storm Worm Wikipedia entry.
