Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, Calif., are creating what is in effect a vast digital petri dish able to hold one million operating systems at once in an effort to study the behavior of rogue programs known as botnets.

Botnets are used extensively by malicious computer hackers to steal computing power from Internet-connected computers. The hackers harness the stolen resources into a scattered but powerful computer that can be used to send spam, execute phishing scams or steal digital information. These remote-controlled “distributed computers” are difficult to observe and track.

Botnets may take over parts of tens of thousands or in some cases even millions of computers, making them among the world’s most powerful computers for some applications.

“When a forest is on fire you can fly over it, but with a cyberattack you have no clear idea of what it looks like,” said Ron Minnich, a Sandia scientist who specializes in computer security. “It’s an extremely difficult task to get a global picture.”

To stalk the botnets, Mr. Minnich and his colleague Don Rudish have converted a Dell supercomputer to simulate a mini-Internet of one million computers.

The researchers said they hoped to be able to infect their digital petri dish with a botnet in October and then gather data on how the system behaves. One of the challenges will be in tricking the botnet components into believing they are running in the open Internet.

Some botnet makers have designed their programs to detect so-called honey pots, programs that pretend to be computers that can be taken over but which instead are used to capture and observe botnet clients.

Typically, supercomputers have been designed with the goal of reaching absolute computing performance, and used for complex scientific or engineering tasks like modeling the earth’s climate, protein folding or simulating nuclear weapons explosions.

The Sandia computer, which the researchers have named MegaTux, in a reference to Tux, the penguin character that is the official mascot of the Linux operating system, is an example of a new kind of computational science, in which computers are used to simulate scientific instruments that were once used in physical world laboratories. For example, Microsoft researchers have created a vast visualization database they call the world wide telescope.

“One of the advantages of such a system is that we can stop the simulation at any point and look for patterns,” Mr. Rudish said. “It’s one of the neat things you can do when you crash a simulation of a 747 on a supercomputer.”

In the past, the researchers said, no one has tried to program a computer to simulate more than tens of thousands of operating systems.

The Dell Thunderbird supercomputer used for the Sandia project has 4,480 Intel microprocessors, far fewer than the million operating systems the researchers sought to simulate. But they used “virtual machine” software technology to get each microprocessor to simultaneously run many instances of a Linux-based component called a kernel — a basic component of an operating system that manages communications between software and hardware.

Because most botnets are written for the Windows operating system, the researchers are planning to use an open source program called Wine, making it possible to run Windows-based programs without actually having the complete Windows operating system. They said they were not using Windows itself because of the licensing costs of purchasing one million copies of Windows.

                                   

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Correction Thomas Holbrook II 2009-07-29 10:23:28 "Botnets are used extensively by malicious computer hackers" People who use such things for malicious purposes are not hackers, period! Reply | Quote 0   0

how will their test be represenative? Tistje 2009-07-29 13:07:43 I understand that one million Microsoft Windows licences would be a huge cost, but I'm puzzled on how they will use linux + wine to emulate the exploiting of Windows flaws. As I understand it, wine emulates the Windows subsystems, but not the kernel (I'm no expert, could be wrong here). So using kernel flaws would probably not be representative. Using flaws on the subsystems might not give you the same level of privilege escalation on linux+wine as you would get on linux. Can you enlighten me? Reply | Quote 0   0

Bryan 2009-07-29 19:22:32 Actually, Bots aren't typical viruses, according to my understanding... Besides, Wine does load as a kernel module, so it's not far off, and Wine has had to replicate bugs in order to maintain program compatibility. This is to study the effects of a botnet inside of a contained environment, not Windows' flaws. Did that help? Reply | Quote 0   0

Tistje 2009-07-30 06:51:54 It seems to me like wine doesn't really load a kernel module, but launches a deamon (wineserver) that provides the services otherwise provided by the Windows kernel. But you are right, from rereading the article it looks like they want to see how a botnet behaves, not how systems are added to it. thanks for the hints Reply | Quote 0   0

Botnet Mark Hall 2009-08-25 03:15:49 A botnet is a network of compromised machines that can be remotely controlled by an attacker. Due to their immense size (tens of thousands of systems can be linked together), they pose a severe threat to the community. With the help of honeynets we can observe the people who run botnets - a task that is difficult using other techniques. Due to the wealth of data logged, it is possible to reconstruct the actions of attackers, the tools they use, and study them in detail. http://www.royalhabanos.com/ Reply | Quote 0   0

FYI Mike 2009-09-01 15:32:35 Sandia National Labs are located in Albuquerque, New Mexico. So either the test was in ABQ, NM or it was at a different lab. Just a heads up for you. ^_^ Reply | Quote 0   0

FYI re: FYI Anonymous 2009-09-22 12:21:32 Mike wrote: Sandia National Labs are located in Albuquerque, New Mexico. So either the test was in ABQ, NM or it was at a different lab. Just a heads up for you. ^_^ Sandia has labs in both Albuquerque and Livermore. Just a heads up for you. ^_^ Reply | Quote 0   0

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