Man Arrested In Zombie Crackdown

from the a-good-start dept

Fri, Jan 14th 2005 12:50pm — Mike Masnick

There aren't many details, but apparently someone has been arrested for launching distributed denial of service attacks using a bunch of zombie machines. It's not clear if the person in question is accused of setting up the machines with trojans or if he's just using a zombie network that someone else designed. Either way, it's a good sign that law enforcement around the world is looking at ways to crack down on zombie machines and attacks from those machines.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

2 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

Steve Mueller, 14 Jan 2005 @ 5:32pm

Bots
Yes, it's great to see them focusing on these dirtbags more.
I do wish ISPs would be a little more mindful of things, though. While I don't expect them to be the Internet police, couldn't they monitor traffic (in a general way) leaving their users' computers? If a computer was generating an inordinate amount of traffic (especially if it hadn't done so before), the ISP could contact the user and ask if they were sending lots of data. If the user said they weren't, the ISP could help them get the bot of their system.
It seems like it would be a win-win-win situation. The user would probably get better response from his system and be more secure, the ISP would reduce bandwidth and complaints, and the Internet community at large would improve.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Mike (profile), 14 Jan 2005 @ 5:44pm

Re: Bots
Yeah, I totally agree... and I should say that *some* ISPs are moving in this direction, and there's something of a mini-industry of companies looking to help them do this. Comcast already does this to some extent. Rather than shutting off port 25 automatically (pissing off plenty of legit users), they watch the traffic, and if they notice what looks like a spam-sending zombie *then* they block port 25. This seems like a good step towards the middle ground you describe.
[ link to this | view in thread ]