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posted by n1 on Tuesday June 02 2015, @11:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the net-neutrality dept.

Earlier this month, Brett Wentworth took Level 3 Communications Inc. into territory that most rivals have been reluctant to enter. The director of global security at the largest carrier of Internet traffic cut off data from reaching a group of servers in China that his company believed was involved in an active hacking attack.

The Broomfield, Colo., company handles roughly 40% of internet traffic and is taking an aggressive—and some say risky approach—to battling criminal activity. Risky because hackers often hijack legitimate machines to do their dirty work, raising the risk of collateral damage by sidelining a business using the same group of servers. Such tactics also run against a widely held belief that large carriers should be facilitating traffic, not halting it.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 02 2015, @01:03PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 02 2015, @01:03PM (#191121)

    Idea: botnet command and control via minecraft signs.

  • (Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday June 02 2015, @03:23PM

    by Marand (1081) on Tuesday June 02 2015, @03:23PM (#191162) Journal

    Idea: botnet command and control via minecraft signs.

    Can go further than that. There's a mod [ocdoc.cil.li] that adds "computer" blocks to the game and gives in-game access to Lua scripting, which can be configured to allow internet access [ocdoc.cil.li] from within the game. You could control a botnet from within minecraft, maybe even trigger changes via the game's circuits (redstone).

    For a less malicious use, you could probably use it to facilitate cross-server communication, like some sort of minecraft-specific gopher or usenet implementation.

    (All hypothetical, I never did much with the computer mods other than read up on them a bit)

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 02 2015, @05:11PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 02 2015, @05:11PM (#191194)

    Network security researchers usually investigate botnets based on which server they talk to. The fact that your bots keep talking to hosts acting like Minecraft servers will be picked up quickly for anything but the tiniest botnet.