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Bashin' the bots

Posted on 9 Apr 2008 at 12:05

Davey Winder steps into the murky world of botnets and gets some disturbing results from a routine online health check.

In short, sniffing out the control channels that move instructions around a distributed network of zombie machines, then shutting them down, rips the heart out of that botnet. BotSniffer can also reveal all the zombie PCs connected through a particular control server, and the other control servers, too - it can take down the whole kit and caboodle. Okay, so it's all a lab-based simulation rather than a real-world product just yet, but the prototype is said to be proving hugely successful under lab conditions.

EULA hoops

A few issues ago, I wrote about how spyware can get around the law and infiltrate your PC by manipulating the lack of understanding many end users have of the terms and conditions set out in the average End User License Agreement (EULA). As a rule, these things tend to be so complex, often apparently written by a robot versed in legalese, that it's hardly surprising we fail to spot the bit that says: "Oh, I almost forgot to mention, by accepting this agreement you give us the right to install malware on your computer and serve you with annoying adverts from dawn to dusk."

It's in that light that my thanks go out to regular reader Tony Stockman, who got in touch to suggest I took a look at a rather nifty little tool that will do the agreement-reading for you. Tony says: "I've been using this useful little program for several years now and don't load any software until it's run the check. It's not foolproof, but is an excellent first line of defence that could save your readers some angst." The tool in question is EULAlyzer 1.2 (www.javacoolsoftware.com/eulalyzer.html), which is free for personal and educational use and promises to simply "analyse licence agreements for interesting words and phrases".

Having now tried it for myself, I can concur that it does indeed analyse the most complex of EULAs within a few seconds and compiles a detailed list of those words and phrases most likely to prove problematical. These get indexed into categories like "adverts", "third party", "pop-ups" or "unique identifiers" and one click provides more detailed information on the particular clause in question. As well as keeping an archive of your analysed agreements for future reference, there's also an online EULA Research Center facility where you can anonymously submit an agreement for review. Of course, the one thing EULAlyzer can't do is provide any kind of legal advice based upon its analysis: it merely highlights areas you need to look at more closely and which could easily be missed otherwise. I'm certainly going to be making use of it from now on, and I'd recommend it as being worthy of further inspection by anyone who takes their system security seriously but finds lengthy legal texts difficult to comprehend.

dotCrime Manifesto

Whether you're perusing the virtual shelves of Amazon or the real thing on the high street, book shops reflect real-world technology trends by the sheer quantity of books covering any subject that's currently in fashion. When I wrote my first book on internet communications back in 1994, you could gauge how much the UK consumer cared about the internet from the metre or so of net-related titles on offer (none of which were even UK-orientated). Now fast-forward 14 years and those same shelves positively groan under the weight of hundreds of metres of net-related titles.

What I have noticed, certainly over the past year or so, is that there's been a steady increase in the number of titles covering IT security in one way or another, from the simplest of idiot guides through to reference tomes aimed at system administrators. What we've been missing, though, is someone with the technical know-how and clarity of vision - not to mention the balls - to write something that challenges the very foundations of the internet and suggests a complete plan for reinventing it in order to build a better and safer system. And that's exactly what Phillip Hallam-Baker has done with dotCrime Manifesto: How to Stop Internet Crime (ISBN 0-321-50358-9).