comStar Firewall alert - PhaseThrough

hacker’s handbook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
88
BotnetS
Normally when you load an agent onto a different node from
your commlink, you maintain an active subscription to that agent,
issuing orders and receiving feedback in real time with a minimum of
hassle. Naturally, your active subscriptions limit the number of agents
you can have running at once. To get around that, instead of maintaining
active subscriptions you can link your agents into a network—a
botnet. A botnet isn’t as slick as an active subscription, but if you’re
looking to recruit a codezombie army of doom, it’s a good start.
By itself you might think a botnet is simply a useful tool for
managing a lot of agents, but the implications for hackers are huge.
With a botnet you can keep tabs on dozens of nodes at once, setting
up some truly righteous hacks. Most really organized Matrix
gangs and syndicate Matrix crime crews use botnets for distributed
denial of service (DDOS) attacks, extending their traditional protection
rackets and blackmail operations into the Sixth World. A
DDOS attack uses scores or hundreds of bots on different nodes
to connect to a single node at the same time, usually preventing all
traffic into and out of the node—quite a killer for a commercial
node, and well worth it to online merchants to pay a “protection”
fee against the possibility of it happening to them.
> Sometimes when you can’t pull off a big hack, you can use a botnet
to pull off a lot of little hacks that add up to the same thing.
Perfect example: traffic control. Hacking the individual lights and
using bots to control them can be a hell of a lot easier than hacking
the central traffic node.
> Turbo Bunny
> Unless, like in Hong Kong, all of the traffic lights are slaved to the
central node anyway, in which case you have no choice but to hack it.
Or in New York, where the lights are tied into the GridGuide system
for better traffic flow control.
> Traveler Jones
See, it’s not just hackers that use botnets—it’s corps too! How
do you think AZT manages its fleets of spambots, or MCT datafarms
millions of customer datafiles every day? Their experts use
botnets to direct and control fleets of agents, and if you know what
to look for you can take control of one or more of their bots and
get them to work for you—at least, until the wageslave managing
the botnet notices something weird is going on.
While the corps don’t like to talk about it, botnets are also a
way for them to wage war on one another through the Matrix. It’s a
rarely used tactic for a megacorp to directly fuck with another megacorporate
node with a botnet because of the fear of reprisals from
the Corporate Court; current Matrix warfare theory holds that if
two AAA-rated megacorps decided to engage in a full-scale Matrix
conflict, botnets would feature prominently in the strategy.
tHe art of war
Posted By: Pistons
To a combat hacker like me, the Matrix is a battlefield.
Espionage, siegecraft, stratagems, the parry and thrust of cybercombat.
The kid’s covered some of the basic weapons you’ll have
in your conflicts across the Matrix, so what you need now is the
down-and-dirty of the tactics hackers use. A little strategy and the
right weapon can win any war.
MaSS proBeS
The key to a successful botnet isn’t getting a lot of agents—
you can copy those programs for free. What you really need is a
large number of nodes to run your agents on. That’s where a mass
probe comes in. It starts off by having a large list of potential
targets—hacker nexi usually have dozens of these lists around, but
you can use the Yellow Pages node if you really want to. There
are different strategies and mathematical formulae to optimize
the methodology, but in essence a mass probe is a very quick and
direct attack on a node to see if it responds—if it does, you break
off quick, if it doesn’t you log it. Either way, you move on down
to the next node on the list. After a couple hours of dedicated
probing, you’ll have a list of poorly defended nodes that should be
a cinch to load your agents into.
> You can also mass probe to create a botnet and then have the
agents on the botnet mass probe and replicate to create more botnets,
etc. That’s how the most malicious worms spread. The Grid
Overwatch Division and local authorities keep an eye out for that
type of thing, though, and try to nip it in the bud.
> Cosmo
MaSS attackS
Hackers are generally solo types, untrusting and untrustworthy
of other hackers.
> Hey! I resemble that.
> Puck
Still, hackers also have a long tradition of teamwork and cooperation
with other hackers for really big hacks. A mass attack is just
Unwired
Simon Wentworth (order #1132857) 9