Researchers at TippingPoint Technologies' Digital Vaccine Laboratories have
found a way to infiltrate and seize control of one of the world's largest
spam-spewing botnets, a breakthrough that has ignited an intense debate over
the ethics of "cleaning" infected computers.
Cody Pierce and Pedram Amini, two high-profile software security
researchers, cracked into the Trojan powering Kraken—a 400,000-strong botnet of
infected computers—by reverse-engineering the encryption routines and figuring
out the communication structure between the botnet owner and the hijacked
computers.
Once they got a clear understanding of the inner workings of Kraken, the duo
found that the infected computers were trying to connect to a master C&C
(command and control) server by systematically generating subdomains from
various dynamic DNS (Domain Name System) resolver services.
Read the full article at eWEEK: Kraken Botnet Infiltration Triggers Ethics Debate
