Bringing Botnets Out of the Shadows Online Volunteers Monitor Illegal Computer Networks
By Brian Krebs washingtonpost.com Staff Writer Tuesday, March 21, 2006; 9:39 AM
Nicholas Albright's first foray into some of the darkest alleys of the Internet came in November 2004, shortly after his father committed suicide. About a month following his father's death, Albright discovered that online criminals had broken into his dad's personal computer and programmed it to serve as part of a worldwide, distributed network for storing pirated software and movies.
Albright managed to get the network shuttered with a call to the company providing the Internet access the criminals were using to control it. From that day forward, Albright poured all of his free time and pent-up anger over his father's death into assembling "Shadowserver," a group of individuals dedicated to battling large, remote-controlled herds of hacked personal PCs, also known as "botnets."
Now 27, Albright supports his wife and two children as a dispatcher for a health care company just outside of Boulder, Colo. When he is not busy fielding calls, Albright is chatting online with fellow Shadowserver members, trading intelligence on the most active and elusive botnets. Each "bot" is a computer on which the controlling hacker has installed specialized software that allows him to commandeer many of its functions. Hackers use bots to further their online schemes or as collection points for users' personal and financial information.