Virtual Computer Army Takes On The Botnets

From New Scientist:

MORE than 1 million virtual computers are set to provide insight into how networks of infected computers called botnets wreak havoc on the internet, as the Conficker worm did recently.

Ron Minnich and Don Rudish of Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, California, crammed 250 independent linux "kernels" - the core system of a computer - onto each of 4400 networked Thunderbird machines, creating a total of over 1.1 million individual virtual computers.

While this network cannot mimic the internet's estimated 600 million computers, the duo hope to use it to study how a small number of machines can attack and bring down larger networks. They can also study, for example, why some botnets prefer to be small and others large.

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