Many media companies are paying big money to try and stop file sharing of copyrighted material. While the material in question is being shared illegally, many of the techniques these companies employ effect everyone by generating much additional internet traffic. In this presentation I present research into some new techniques currently being used to attack BitTorrent swarms and the prevalence of these attacks.
Author Archive for Brad Schonhorst
More and more often we hear about botnets being responsible for a larger piece of Internet crime today. Botnets are complex systems and there are many different approaches to combating the problem. I decided to take a look at some of the more recent techniques to discover bot malware infection from network traffic. I came across two particularly interesting methods of identifying infected machines. One is to look at the most often used command and control technique - IRC channels - and try to determine ‘evil’ channels which provide commands for zombie machines. Another idea is to look for DNS Black List lookups, which may be performed by bots to test that an IP address is not listed before using it to send spam. Attached is a short presentation I gave for the ISIS computer lab.
One of the large internet service providers has a new commercial advertising its broadband product which now comes with “FREE SECURITY.” Finally, an end to our concerns about computer security and identity theft! The product includes a firewall, anti-virus, anti-spam, and pop-up blocker but most importantly, peace of mind. Keeping information private on the internet is no longer something to concern yourself with, or at least that is the idea they are trying to sell.
Apparently, ISP’s have completely given up on educating users. While teaching people how to use their computer safely does seem like an impossible task I believe selling this idea of ’security in a box’ actually does more harm than good. Although, I hate the idea of spreading fear, a little dose of paranoia would at least keep everyone mindful of what information they distribute.
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