Hacker News Reader

Comment by omergertel | Hacker News Reader

I actually got a tingly feeling in my spine when I watched this lecture. I'm having Terminator's Skynet flashes.

The darkside of internet technology is very interesting... Can you imagine the ingenuity that needs to go into the creation of the software for a botnet? Kind of cool in many ways.

It is utterly cool. I love it, botnets and spam and all. I just wish I had the time to spend with it instead of earning a living.

Some of the interesting parts of botnets have commercial or research value.

As an example... I find it very difficult, in general, to install software onto multiple Windows machines. Different versions of DLLs, differing Windows features, differing filesystem layout, etc. The botnet control system seems to reliably install on all sorts of machines, without needing 3 restarts and without asking lots of dumb questsions.

Making installing real programs this easy and reliable would be quite nice.

I'm guessing the software involved would be fairly simple by comparison and thus there wouldn't be as many complications as in a normal program's installation. Are there any bot nets that use DirectX for example or .Net? I'd doubt it.

These kinds of things are meant to run completely under the radar and take up as little space as possible. Unless they're exploiting an existing .Net or DirectX installation.

Well, true to a certain extent. But if the installation hoses your machine entirely (which it did my daughter's machine), they aren't bothered by customer support calls.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com