More Sheharbano Khattak please.

Free USB sticks being handed out at public events can be dangerous too

Too bad they didn't discuss the botnet topology.. its important to mention that if 1000 bots are attempting to connect with a single c&c they might ddos it. normally each x amount of bots (lets say 50) are "reporting" to a single computer, which also can be a part of the botnet and forwarding the the requests/responses onward, might be even to another node which is not the c&c.

any chance you could do a video about ransom-ware. Most of the viewers of this channel probably know about this threat, but it would be useful to get some professional opinions on the subject

"You just described Windows 10" "This sounds like Windows 10" "Did you know this is Windows 10" "Windows 10"

The best modern day example of a botnet is Windows 10

Could you start putting links for the other videos at the end in the description for mobile user? :)

A vector overlooked even by many security professionals is Adobe Acrobat Reader. When I was still a Windows user, when I upgraded from vista to 7, I refused to install acrobat reader, flash, and Java, and I switched from a Mozilla browser to chrome. Where malware infections were a monthly occurrence in my XP days and happened once in the 13-14 months I ran Vista, in almost 3 years of running win 7 as described above, I never had one infection.

Is it possible that the c&c is also controlled by another c&c, forming an even bigger botnet?

Nice introductory video. Waiting for some more advanced topics.

Another way it can be used for good is distributed computing for scientifical research. Things like Folding at home, or SETI at home, and the likes.

the infected computer could also be called a "Zombie"

What about the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search ? Isn't it technically a botnet, even though users install it willingly?

Ah I've been waiting for this one. You tease, Brady.

It's hard to get depth in a 10 minute youtube video however i consider this an accurate overview.

It's ok guys I have Avast

Computerphile Could you do video about how the tor network works?

That went over my head.

doesnt CERN also use a botnet to help crunch the data they get from their experiments? I also believe there are a few groups that calculate prime numbers and pi that also make use of botnets.

Some of the largest botnets in the world are running in the cloud, and on standard webservers, using pure PHP without the aid of SQL, or root access. But I am far beyond arguing that point.

there is also distributive computing for medical research. like protein folding.

So interesting, so much to learn thank you!!!

Really cool! Thanks!

More videos like this please

The file sharing program Kazaa included in its Terms of Service the right to use your computer in a botnet. It's been while but I think it said that they had the right to use "any storage or computing that is not in use" and that it may be "used to serve advertising or other similar uses" (like DoS attacks).

In a natural world the best types of parasites are those who don't inflict any damage in the host. Malaria is a worst parasite than cold virus, because you can live normally with cold, there is only a few casualties compared to the entire population that is infected with the virus. This is one of the reasons that cold is more common than malaria. I think this is valid for the digital world. If you have a computer virus that constantly breaks the machine, or block the user of doing something (like those annoying adwares), it will be less common than another one does not do any harm to the host. We might be infected without even knowing and without ever wanting to do something about it, because it is not degrading our use in any way.

But what if you have a distributed C&C and use RSA keys to sign orders then flood the network with valid orders when one node gets them

This can actually be put to good use. Users could either voluntarily or 'voluntarily' donate CPU/GPU time slices to High performance compute tasks such as weather prediction, biological research and other simulations. It could work by the user registering their machine and at times when the cpu is idle the botnet could run a process or two which would load the machine by say... 10% which would be unnoticeable to the user.

You just described Windows 10

Doesn't SETI use botnets that you can opt-in to?

Infected computers being set to a date to do an attack without a host server, is that a botnet? or is it "botoffline"?

Someone should create a botnet that fixes the security vulnerabilities which the botnet used to assimilate that computer into itself. :-P

So how does the browser automatically download and run the executable? I am assuming/hoping modern browsers have some protection against this.

Wouldn't distributed computing solutions like Boinc be technically a good botnet?

I found tutorial videos all over KZfaq how to set up these botnets. But YT dont really seem to care? People are doing this online, on video, in the open and dont fear any consequences. It's basically putting the fate of the world in the hands of a dozen teenagers.

can you make a video about a more advance subject, such as phishing

So a botnet is basically a collection of backdoored hosts?

some botnets can mine cypto currencys such as bitcoins ethrum etc. i have seen many botnets even down to botnets that use twitter as a c & c server very nice video.

You can join a network of computers solving medical related tasks.

I think Prime95 would be considered a botnet, but not used for a bad purpose.

Nice to see some diversity

actually i adored windows 10 gathering data , yes i dont trust microsoft but i have nothing to worry about even if the misuse my data i just want them to keep up ...

There are community grids for cancer research and climate info its kinda a botnet for good they can use ur processing power to save money buying high power systems and you can decide how much power ud like to give

The BEST example in common use is Google and Android devices.

sup

Tor isn't perfect. If enough nodes are owned by the feds it is easy for them to figure out what you are doing.

this website is botnet. :^)

Lots of great ideas here. Hi fbi ;)

Too high level

#EarlySquad

prolly not second

Windows 10

1st to comment 1st in binary!

probably not first

**cough** Windows 10 **cough**

I propose we call them droidnets. The word robot comes from the Czech word 'robota' meaning "servtitude" or "forced labour", which I for one do not consider appropriate. We need to abandon our "slave owner" attitude as a species.