Botnet Herders Hide Behind VoIP
January 30th, 2006
Internet telephone applications like Skype and Vonage could become hacker hideouts, a group of technologists and academics funded by MIT and Cambridge University said Thursday.
According to the Communications Research Network (CRN), voice-over-Internet (VoIP) software could give perfect cover for launching denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.
Jon Crowcroft, a Cambridge professor and the lead CRN researcher on the problem, noted that if botnet “herders,” the term given to attackers who control large numbers of bot-infected PCs, turn to VoIP applications for command and control, security experts might find it impossible to trace back an attack to the perpetrator.