BOTNETS Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3500 words

BOTNETS - Essay Example Computers have integrated deeply in our lives and it is due to this fact that the current times can be termed as the technological era. Computers have made life convenient and fast-paced. However, along with the convenience some more things have also been introduced like threat to personal information and intellectual possessions. The invention of internet has aggravated these threats and has given new means for malicious activities. Botnets is one of the newer techniques that is adapted by hackers to gain access to different systems on the network and then perform inappropriate automated tasks through them. The inception of botnets dates back to the days when the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) was very popular among the internet users. IRC is a protocol that has been developed for real time many-to-many communication. IRC consisted of channels and servers on which communication used to take place. Channels used to be operated by channel operators who were in-charge of monitoring the activities on the channels and servers. With the increase of users on IRC, conflicts also increased between the users. The users wanted to gain access to more servers which thereby created conflicts. Some of the users started developing scripts to attempt denial of service and distributed denial of service attacks on the servers to crash them. Crashing the network used to cause refresh of the server and thus assign a new user as the operator. Later, these scripts started being used to target individuals. These malicious activities began the concept of botnets. Bot is defined as malicious software that may be residing on a single computer. It is automated and runs by the command from the IRC server, it makes the computer compromised and a part of a wider network of similar infected systems. Enselmi et al. (2010) stated that this server is also called the Command and Control server and the commands are sent in Command and Control