Business - Written Monday, September 8, 2008 by Jeff DeChambeau - 3 Comments

Facebook: the silent botnet

Wired’s Threat Level has a story up about how researchers have created a facebook application that’s capable of delivering Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks using nothing more than a facebook application and its users. The application, Photo of the Day, is installed by users who want a daily photograph. When users load up the page/photo of the day, the application sends a server to a third-party server (the one being attacked) and requests a large file from it, usually a high resolution image. This high resolution image is silently downloaded to the user’s computer, and not displayed. The effect of this is that by simply using the application, users are draining bandwidth from some targetted server. If enough users are using the application in this way, the server could get overloaded with requests, and rendered inaccessible to the people who are actually trying to visit it. Continue…