With 'Harvesting Botnet', if you meant using and operating botnets, then to my knowledge it is against the law, albeit uncategorized; and is still considered a 'crime' (at least in the US) regardless of what the intentions are. However, the same term could also be interpreted as studying bot behaviors by setting a Honeynet/Honeypot, which is perfectly legal (again, to my understanding), as long as you are not the intruder, and are merely a silent 'sniffer' monitoring JUST the portion of the network that you own. And with that on mind, I recently ran an experimental 'honeypot' for few months, which eventually ended up getting overwhelmed with conficker traffic, and got shut down. And if you or someone else cares to learn more about the first hand botnet fun, here's a phenomenal research paper conducted by some of the researchers at University of California, Santa Barbara, which is what inspired me to get into this madness in the first place. http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~seclab... ~@~

SAAJHA · Oct 22, 2009 7:24 PM

Saajha, I agree. Btw, Long time! How've you been? I suppose he/she was referring to honeypots too. Do not attack the attacker. Fatigue it, tarpit/throttle it, OS fingerprint it, let it believe you are the victim, while you are there "harvesting" its information and then submit to FBI or the Internet community as yet another one on the Offenders' list. Let us hear more from the thread originator how he's involved and his success stories!

OldMaven · Oct 22, 2009 7:43 PM

"With 'Harvesting Botnet', if you meant using and operating botnets, then to my knowledge it is against the law, albeit uncategorized; and is still considered a 'crime' (at least in the US) regardless of what the intentions are. " I agree with u Sajha..By harvesting Botnets, i meant if somebody in our Community is running and Operating Botnets..I know it's against the law..But mark my word, if u r doing so u r an Instant Celebrity.  To get back to the Points, i am not harvesting it(Which i have to say:)) but i have some interesting proposition under my belt that i want help from anyone who is doing so.. Oldmaven,Saajha  I am glad that there is someone in our community who understands what i mean, i think we should have a Beer sometime and talk... Saajha, I will shoot u an email regarding what i am planning to do if u want to participate...

pyaradeshbasiharu · Oct 22, 2009 8:54 PM

Little baffled here, @pyaradeshbasiharu. Did you mean you're into 'botnet-operation' Project? I suppose you've done enough of research prior to getting to this point; as there are plenty of newsgroups, IRC channels, and communities out there, spending time and energy with full due diligence, developing stealthier, yet powerful botnets. I understand, you perhaps wondered if any of this site visitors were into all of this, which I highly doubt. With my some years of experience in the Info Sec world, I've learned that various subsets of cybercrimes are culturally influenced; meaning, the communities and lifestyles somehow structure individuals' needs and desires; and among many such desires that transition into actions, conducting cybercrimes of specific types get embraced by certain geographic communities. Hence a majority of attacks with similar attack vectors originate from the same geographic regions. Code reversing (reverse-engineering), kernel manipulating (building rootkits), malware concealing (changing signatures, masking with 'crypters' etc) are highly prevalent in Eastern Europe and Germany, Network level attacks mostly originate from China and South America, Web defacements are found to be done mainly by the Arab and the middle Easterns, code and buffer overflow exploits are primarily developed and deployed in/from the US. And the masterminds of botnets are no other than Russians and former Soviets. Not to mention, there always are exceptions!! I'd love to hear what your 'bot-harvesting' ideas are, and could possibly help give you some of my insights, if they're within my knowledge boundaries. Feel free to post your thoughts here, so that others can benefit too, unless you think otherwise. @OldMaven.. howdy! It's sure been a while. Among some other posters, I do search for (and read) your threads/posts whenever I am here to catch up on Sajha discussions. Hope all's well. ~@~  

SAAJHA · Oct 24, 2009 2:23 PM