The Last Watchdog

on Internet security by Byron Acohido

No ‘botnet prophylactic’

Posted on | March 20, 2008 | add a comment

NPR’s Alison Stewart, host of The Bryant Project, hooked up with SecureWorks researcher Joe Stewart after reading our story on botnet saturation. Alison does a good job of getting Joe (no relation) to explain the basics of bots in this seven-minute interview. The former MTV and NBC reporter asks: “Is there some sort of botnet prophylactic to help keep my computer from getting infected?” Joe’s answer: “Unfortunately no.”

Joe is one of a large cast of good-guy and bad-guy hackers featured in our book. Here’s a snippet of Chapter 3, introducing Joe, hot on the trail of the SoBig email virus.

Stewart never planned on becoming a virus hunter. Born in Athens, Ohio, he split time growing up between his mom’s home in Florida and his dad’s place in Arizona. An inveterate tinkerer, he and a sixth-grade buddy fiddled endlessly with a Radio Shack TRS-80 color desktop computer, staying after school every day to figure it out and teaching themselves how to program in BASIC. This was in the mid-1980s. Shortly thereafter, Stewart convinced his dad to buy a then-state-of-the-art Commodore VIC-20 desktop computer and progressed even further, sometimes running up $300 in long-distance phone charges to log on to the early techie bulletin boards.

By the time Stewart turned sixteen in the late 1980s, he considered himself fairly computer savvy. But he dropped out of computing for several years to dabble in becoming a rock musician, until one day in 1996 when his mom gave him her worn-out desktop computer. It had an outdated 386 microprocessor; Mom had purchased an upgraded 486 for herself.

“The motivation of being broke and having a wife and baby to support really kicked my learning back into high gear,” says Stewart. Four years later, Stewart found himself part of a select group of perhaps 200 virus hunters, the vast majority young males. These Internet sleuths worked at tech-security companies such as Symantec, McAfee, Trend Micro, Computer Associates, Sophos, F-Secure, MessageLabs, Postini, and several dozen smaller niche players. They had in common with mainstream software programmers a high aptitude for math and problem solving, but they also brought something extra to the table—a healthy sense of injustice.

“I’ve always admired a good hack—but modern viruses are not displays of skill; they are simple brutes that are polluting and pillaging the Internet landscape,” says Stewart. “It’s the powerful taking advantage of the weak. I’m disgusted at how they [criminal hackers] are so ready and willing to destroy what I view as one of mankind’s greatest developments, all for their own selfish greed.”

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