About

Botnets are networks of internet-connected machines containing software to run various automated scripts on the web.

History

Botnets are a varied, unique, and destructive type of malware which had sparked widespread paranoia and fear on the internet. The original botnets cannot be pinpointed to the exact time they were created, but one of the earliest variations known to the internet is the Storm Botnet.

Hola!

Hola! proxy is a less commonly known botnet. It collects users IP addresses by disguising itself as a proxy service, and then steals any user's IP address and places it in a VPN service called luminati.io, from https://8ch.net/hola.html . This is highly related to how a Botnet works.

Storm Worm

The Storm Botnet is also another example of a botnet, the systems being connected by the Storm Worm. It was a widespread virus around the year of 2007, and accounted for about 10 percent of all malware in the world. The Storm Worm was actually a Trojan Horse that spread by email, despite it's name being the Storm 'Worm'. The emails claimed to have news on many deaths from a storm, and the fraudulent email rapidly spread. The Storm Worm was a fatal Trojan Horse for its time.

Zeus Botnet

The Zeus Botnet is a newer type of malware that has slick tactics of hiding itself, and had been said to have been planted on to millions of computers. The creator of the Zeus Botnet had stepped down, and sold the source code to the SpyEye Malware creator. The botnet was used to steal a huge amount of information from the government, and even from numerous innocent PCs.

Anontalk

Anontalk botnet is a famous botnet that purpotedly had a role in getting various users banned from 4chan. Anontalk, before it had shut down by the FBI, was a pedophile website actively hosting and supporting child pornography, along with hosting malware. The Anontalk botnet is rumored to have downloaded or aided the download of child pornography, potentially serving other malicious services.

Mirai Botnet

On August 31st, 2016, the whitehat malware research group MalwareMustDie^[1] published a report announcing the discovery of the Mirai botnet, a worm which hijacked smart devices used in a number of high profile DDoS attacks. On September 30th, 2016, Mirai coauthor Anna-senpai leaked the source code for the botnet in a post on HackForums.^[2]

On January 17th, 2017, computer security expert Brian Krebs published a blog post claiming to have discovered the identity of Anna-senpai, who he speculated was Paras Jha, the owner of the DDoS mitigation service company ProTraf Solutions and student at New Jersey's Rutgers University. Additionally, Krebs reported that the name Mirai was derived from the anime series Mirai Nikki. The post was later updated to include a response from Jha, who denied having authored the Mirai software:

“I don’t think there are enough facts to definitively point the finger at me. Besides this article, I was pretty much a nobody. No history of doing this kind of stuff, nothing that points to any kind of sociopathic behavior. Which is what the author is, a sociopath.”

On April 13th, the Bitdefender BOX YouTube channel uploaded a video explaining Mirai botnet attacks (shown below).

On December 13th, Paras Jha, Josiah White and Dalton Norman plead guilty to authoring the Mirai software. Additionally, they claimed to have been primarily trying to gain advantages in Minecraft by targeting various servers running the online sandbox game.

Use on 4chan

4chan and such websites have turned this malicious term into a meme, such as: proclaiming anything that collects data, such as Google Chrome, is a botnet, along with insulting anybody that uses 3rd party by exclaiming the following term: ">Using a botnet".
People that support 3rd party will usually connect with the phrase ">le botnet meme" or similar trolling habits, because Google Chrome and such 3rd Party Programs aren't exactly botnets, despite their similar behavior.
The origin of how it became used as a meme is undefined.

Search Interest

External References