White Hats versus the Black Hats: Virtual Army takes on Conficker Worm and the Evil Botnets

"So we meet again in Cyberspace! Only this time I have the evil Conficker worms to do my bidding! "

Unfortunately, it's not another dubious plot in a Bond movie, its' real life in the virtual world of Cyberspace.

More than 1 million 'super-hero' virtual computers are set to provide insight into how the evil 'super-villain' botnets, networks of infected computers wreak havoc on the internet.

The Conficker worm is currently the most infamous and notorious of these. Much has been written about the damage it has done recently and much time nd effort is going into counter-measures.

Ron Minnich and Don Rudish of Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, California, crammed 250 independent linux "kernels" - the core system of a computer - onto each of 4400 networked Thunderbird machines, creating a total of over 1.1 million individual virtual computers.

While this network cannot mimic the internet's estimated 600 million computers, the duo hope to use it to study how a small number of machines can attack and bring down larger networks. They can also study, for example, why some botnets prefer to be small and others large.

A good anti-Malware application will detect a high percentage of botnets but not the very smart ones. The most insidious of the botnets are the ones that use stealth to infect and remain resident and undetected on a "victim's" system. Good Luck guys!