I read up on these repeatedly and I just don't get it. Explanations appreciated. Is this something I actually buy?

I know about tacnets and agents (where 'bot' could be also a name for them), but botnets? Source, please.

Unwired, Page 100.

Bot-Nets are hundreds if not thousands of computers infected with trojans(no, not kondoms, a certain kind of semi intelligent virus) that can be remotecontrolled to an extent to do whatever you tell them to do. Basically, it's your very own personal cloud computing cloud.

Couldn't you just pick up a bunch of cheap commlinks to make such a cloud? Or better yet, make a cloud of commlinks that will interact with a cloud to tell all the bots what to do?

Yes, you could.
But using the computers of other people means aside for the software you use for the C³-Interface, you will have no costs for yourself.
Also not much pointing into your direction and much pointing in other directions. Put the blame on other people.
And of course, nobody is stopping you from doing an avalanche. Make a Botnet of 10 that each make another botnet of 10.
Let it run for some generations and you are now at several hundred thousand bot-controlled computers. Now tell them to do X.
Massive parallel computing on a global scale. Basically enough computing power to take down any server that you want.
But of course, there's firewalls and anti virus programs out there to stop this from happening.
So the bots have to come with several other software packages like stealth and exploit at least.

Stahl has is pretty covered, but I wanted to add: This is a real hacker technique used today. The archtypical Botnet attack is a DDOS - Distributed Denial of Service - which simply floods the network connections of the target with junk traffic, slowing them to a crawl and preventing legitimate users from getting on. It's tough to stop, and even tougher to track down - if you're getting 100000 attacks, 99999 of them are clueless grandmothers who opened the wrong email.

Nope, all of them are.
Whoever is behind one of those is probably not dumb enough to let his own connection participate.
Also, think SETI at Home. Or Folding at Home. Or that thing with the Human Genome.
If you can hide the fact that something else is using the computer, you can use the cloud for WHATEVER you want.
Cracking Passwords for example. DDOS is the most basic thing to do with a cloud.
Yesterday, when Dumpshock crashed? Yes, that was a DDOS which all of us initiated. Accidental of course.

I promise, next time better botnet/DDOS attack rules.

Today, you can RENT such bot-nets.
And time on a cloud to crack passwords too.
*pokes AH*
In what book and when in what corp?
sorry, i could not help myself <.<

Much appreciated, boss.

I want to suggest a Hub, something which can't do much of anything on its own but can handle 20 or 30 connections. I imagine the bounce through it will use the Response of the lower of either the Hub or your PAN.

While I (maybe) have your attention, please more humanoid drones! There must be a bunch of old dirt cheap ones that most people don't use anymore after the Renraku incident except when they're too cheap to upgrade, which Runners can exploit.

Thank you kindly.

No Problem. I do Tech-Support i'm afraid <.<

Just recalled a game that was massively matrix based 2 tsm and 3 hackers of some type. We ended up making a worm to infect as much of the 'trix as we could. We used this for no other purpose than to run huge data searches and rent out parts of it. Of corse we spent a lot of time won the wrong side of GOD for this.

I think one part of the bot net was used to store data in a way that only one in controll of the entire botnet could retrieve it scatter the bits on the bot net with redundancy and strong encryption on the items of data. On this we sotre extra copies of code as well as paydata and such.

I was under the impression that these were for drones, thinking of "bot" and drone interchangeably. Mea culpa.

Tacnet and Botnet? ^^

I just hope bookkeeping won't turn into a nightmare for hackers.




In SR, too - there's a table with the prices at the end of Unwired.

i just skimmed over that one <.<

Fun fact: evidently, Amazon's other big business, aside from destroying brick and mortar stores by offering a superior selection at a drastic discount is running a cloud rental service, using their own farms of computers.