New 420.000 compromised Computers being used in BotnetA 420,000 node botnet that breaks a volume's worth of Internet laws has been created thanks to the machinations of a researcher who is now at risk of facing more than a lifetime in jail. This researcher, who remains anonymous, had a well-meaning goal behind his scheme: The botnet is supposed to map out the rest of the remaining unexplored and unmapped IPv4 Internet. This unorthodox move could cost him his freedom and his job, because in light of all the laws he's broken to create the botnet, he could face jail time spanning centuries or even millennia if current sentencing policies are still in effect. The billions of pings made by the 420,000 node botnetShould be enough to get the sheer number of IPv4 addresses required to make mapping it work, especially in light of the amount of scanners that would've been used without the botnet technology doing all the scanning for itself.
Nevertheless, it's still illegal in light of how dangerous, out-of-control, and downright morally questionable the use of botnets are. These programs essentially replace the use of scanners in order to do the mapping.
The botnet works because it takes advantage of vulnerabilities (as botnets are wont to), thus delivering all the pings the researcher would ever need to complete his map.
The researcher was able to notice that IPv4 devices... thousands of them... were completely exposed and only requires admin or root, root/root, or admin/admin login while the password field is left mostly blank.
A light bulb figuratively flashed atop of his head as he though what if he could use these vulnerabilities to make a 420,000 node botnet to perform his mapping for him? For those who aren't aware of the gravity of his folly, this is the rough equivalent of hijacking security cameras for the sake of checking if everyone is safe like a real-life Big Brother watching the streets and homes of a given city.
It was both ingenious and morally questionable.
The researcher admitted that even though he had his reservations, the act was one of those once-in-a-lifetime deals he believed he would regret for the rest of his life if he didn't do it.
He thought the act as "fun" and he was wondering if the infrastructure he formulated in his mind would have functioned as well as he imagined.
This was his chance to work on something of a Worldwide-Web scale, with him commanding hundreds of thousands of devices with a click of his mouse button for the sake of mapping the Information Superhighway like no one had ever done so before using the Carna IPv4 botnet.
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