Let me tell you about a strange convergence of zombie-related events this past weekend. As I often do before the weekend, I printed out a few stories I’ve been meaning to read, figuring I’d get to them in between innings at a Little League game or in this case, during downtime at a really fun and free Earthfest concert in downtown Boston featuring 90s-ish bands such as Cake and Cracker.
To make a long story longer, there I was at Earthfest in between music sets reading up on Microsoft Research investigators Yinglian Xie and Fang Yu , who are trying to stomp out zombie botnets:
“Today, we’re seeing a lot of network attacks from compromised zombie hosts, often referred to as botnet hosts,” Xie explains. “They’re being used to launch and distribute denial-of-service attacks, and they’re notorious for launching large-scale spam campaigns.”
The most interesting aspect of the Microsoft research is the focus on how dynamic IP addresses might give clues to cracking zombie-based botnets. The researchers analyzed Hotmail accounts and learned that almost 96% of the servers with dynamic IP addresses were used solely for spitting out spam. About 4 of every 10 pieces of spam sent to Hotmail users examined got their spam via dynamic IP addresses. These revelations are stunning in light of a previous focus by spam fighters on host IP addresses.
Anyway, no sooner do I finish reading the article that I look up and see about 40 people ghouled up in bloody zombie make-up and attire marching through the concert crowd . Some carried signs with messages such as “Brains, not Bombs.” Some people were amused by the zombies, others were kinda freaked out and others asked: “Is this supposed to be funny?”
Of course, we can live with this sort of zombie from time to time. But here’s wishing the Microsoft researchers good luck in helping to solve the zombie botnet problem.
