When spammers attacked our “English at the Beach” website, on both the Guestbooks and the Feedback Survey pages, we were experiencing the “New Chicago-style Web”.
“We used to call the Internet a sort of Wild West. Now it’s more like Chicago in the 1920s with Al Capone,” says Prolexic President Keith Laslop.
Writing up my research on the web usage server logs, i needed a definition of ‘botnet’. While searching, i came across an intriguing article in Wired late last year, which outlines an attack on Six Apart’s Type Pad and Live Journal blog networks.
According to the article by Scott Berinato, One Russian spammer was determined (allegedly) to take out a vigilante anti-spam crowd known as Blue Security, who employed an anti-spam (ro-)bot called “Blue Frog”.
The spammers attacked the security firm’s web site (with huge Denial of Service attacks), so the director of Blue Security re-directed his domain to a Live Journal blog site, to keep customers informed. This led to the whole of Six Apart’s blog-oporium going down as well.
The director sought help, from a big security firm called Prolexic. They put shields in place to protect the Blue Frog anti-spammers. At first it seemed that the Russian spammer had given up, but then he returned and took out Prolexic’s entire DNS server in one hit, removing their protection over many sites.
Blue Security gave up, and the director has still not emerged from hiding, five months later. The (allegedly) bad Russian spammer remains at large with his or her “Botnets” (massive networks of around 100,000 zombie machines, operated remotely).
Berinato, Scott. “Attack of the Bots”. Wired Magazine, Vol 14.11, November ’06. wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/botnet.html 4 February 2007.