So You Want to Take Over a Botnet...

Computer criminals regularly construct large distributed attack networks comprised of many thousands of compromised computers around the globe. Once constituted, these attack networks are used to perform computer crimes, creating yet other sets of victims of secondary computer crimes, such as denial of service attacks, spam delivery, theft of personal and financial information for performing fraud, exfiltration of proprietary information for competitive advantage (industrial espionage), etc.

The arms race between criminal actors who create and operate botnets and the computer security industry and research community who are actively trying to take these botnets down is escalating in aggressiveness. As the sophistication level of botnet engineering and operations increases, so does the demand on reverse engineering, understanding weaknesses in design that can be exploited on the defensive (or counter-offensive) side, and the possibility that actions to take down or eradicate the botnet may cause unintended consequences.