A brief article by James Middleton shows how file sharing pirates intend to take over high bandwidth servers like those used at Universities.
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As a result, thousands of machines are thought to be infected with rogue file-sharing software controlled by Internet Relay Chat (IRC) ‘bots’, unknowingly participating in a massive underground file-sharing network.
These large bot networks are extremely popular and bandwidth hungry. The largest have 300 to 400 bots, all logged into the same IRC network and listening on the same IRC channel.
Larger channels can have thousands of individuals downloading files from these bots.
IRC has long been favoured by the hacker community to congregate, discuss tactics and techniques, and trade tools.
But more recently, as bots have developed, IRC has been used to control large numbers of IRC-aware distributed denial of service (DoS) zombie programs and warez distribution bots.
An increasing overlap has appeared between the hacking and warez communities, and software pirates are now borrowing techniques and tools from the hacking community.
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Read the story here.
