The shadow network architecture

We live in an age when the networks we have created give us so much access and so much power. Naturally, there are those who have taken that beautiful thing and twisted it for their own evil ends.

I'm talking about botnets. By all accounts they are growing at an incredible rate. A few weeks ago it was reported that Conficker is adding 50,000 PCs to its network every day. Way too many people wrote off Conficker after the hype about April 1 that never materialized - but eight days later it got an update that made it stronger and better able to spread.

Some have speculated that Conficker is a dry run, that it's testing the world's reactions and defenses. The speculation is that Conficker is funded and backed by some entity that would either want to strengthen and use the botnet, or would want to come out with a more powerful version later, using learnings from the dry run.

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We live in an age when the networks we have created give us so much access and so much power. Naturally, there are those who have taken that beautiful thing and twisted it for their own evil ends.

I'm talking about botnets. By all accounts they are growing at an incredible rate. A few weeks ago it was reported that Conficker is adding 50,000 PCs to its network every day. Way too many people wrote off Conficker after the hype about April 1 that never materialized - but eight days later it got an update that made it stronger and better able to spread.

Some have speculated that Conficker is a dry run, that it's testing the world's reactions and defenses. The speculation is that Conficker is funded and backed by some entity that would either want to strengthen and use the botnet, or would want to come out with a more powerful version later, using learnings from the dry run.

On a separate note, China wants to require all PCs in the country to run a piece of porn-blocking software. Regardless of what you might think of China and its policies, experts have already found technical flaws in the software that could lead to every PC in China being compromised by a botnet.

One of the best-written columns on this subject appeared in Network World about a month ago. In "Dark cloud computing," Andreas Antonopoulos called botnets "the largest, most flexible cloud computing infrastructure ever seen." Botnets are cloud-computing infrastructures built on the backs of unwilling participants.

As Antonopoulos says, there is no set aim or purpose to these botnets. The first goal of the botnet is to become widespread, to establish the shadow infrastructure. Then what? Well, then the purpose can be whatever your heart desires.

Read more about security in Network World's Security section.