New Security Threat from P2P Bot Networks -- "Phatbot"

Security agencies are monitoring the emergence of a new type of Trojan Horse that uses peer-to-peer networks of bots to mount denial of service attacks on targeted sites. Dubbed Phatbot, one such Trojan is spreading widely across the Net and is especially difficult to disable due to the peer-to-peer nature of the attack. This type of technology is something that I predicted would emerge several years ago when I was thinking about cyberwarfare. If enough PC's had such bots installed, they could literally take a government offline by focusing their combined outputs on a set of key nodes around the network. Similarly these networks could be used by protestors, or by terrorists, to bring business and communications to a halt. The problem is, the centralized architectures of our current networks are simply impossible to defend from distributed threats. We need to start developing truly decentralized server architectures that cannot be targeted and taken offline by attacks on any one location.

Comments

[Paul Hughes]

I think decentralizing is the answer to a wide variety of security concerns, both online and off. I think the article, Divided We Stand in Wired a couple of years ago,

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/defense.html?pg=1&topic=&topic_set=

sums it up rather well. With decentralizationg there is no central point of control and therefor no one point of weakness. Obviously, the net itself was designed in this fashion.

The irony of all this is, those in power who supposedly are looking for increased security seem the most unwilling to do the one thing that will most assure it - decentralization. Perhaps, because being in power is itself a centralizing thing, so it runs against their nature.