Darknet v. Botnet

In Moving Ahead in the War Against Botnets, 12 Sep 2006, the blogger Darknet comments on an article that says that Gadi Evron, manager of the Israeli CERT, started a public mailing list back in March:

Over the last year, the group has done its work quietly on closed, invite-only mailing lists. Now, Evron has launched a public, open mailing list to enlist the general public to help report botnet C&C servers.

The new mailing list will serve as a place to discuss detection techniques, report botnets, pass information to the relevant private groups and automatically notify the relevant ISPs of command-and-control sightings.

Hunt Intensifies for Botnet Command & Controls By Ryan Naraine, EWeek March 2, 2006

This is a good example of collective action against aggregate damage.

The same article quotes Dan Hubbard about Websense's botnet-spotting features in its products. This is a good example of how commercial products can complement for-free collective activities such as mailing lists.

-jsq

PS: Thanks to Wendy Nather for this one.