On Tue, 24 Jul 2007 12:00:40 CDT, Joe Greco said:
Hardly unexpected. The continuing evolution is likely to be pretty scary. Disposables are nice, but the trouble and slowness in seeding makes them less valuable. I'm expecting that we'll see compartmentalized bots, where each bot has a small number of neighbors, a pseudo-scripting command language, extensible communication ABI to facilitate the latest in detection avoidance, and some basic logic to seed/pick neighbors that aren't local. Build in some strong encryption, have them each repeat the encrypted orders to their neighbors, and you have a structure that would be exceedingly difficult to deal with.
Considering how long ago that sort of model was proposed, it is actually remarkable that it doesn't seem to have been perfected by now, and that we're still blocking IRC.
Obviously, botnet authors are lazy, and not motivated to do all that work to do all that extra stuff, when we're still focusing on the *last* generation of "use a well-known IRC net for C&C" bots, and haven't really address the *current* "use a hijacked host running a private IRC net" bots yet. Equally likely - somebody's already written the code, but is waiting for when it is actually *needed* before deploying. If you're the leading side of an arms race, tipping your hand regarding the next escalation is usually a bad idea....