Okay, I hear abut people running bot-nets all the time, and i have a few questions.
-Could I run a small bot-net on a couple of old computers (2006-2008) that I have laying around? I'm not sure what i would use it for, which brings me to my next question.
-What are bot-nets used for, aside for malicious purposes? That might be kind of a dumb question, but if i can run one, i don't want to get into any trouble.
-How hard is it to create a bot-net? I figure one would need an understanding of a certain language, but which one? JavaScript? Python? Or maybe more than one?
I'm sorry if this is under the wrong category, but I figured I would put it here since I really wouldn't "hack" with this thing...if that's even possible.
Thanks in advance for the feedback and answers.
There are a few uses for webbots. These include:
* Spidering the Internet. This is what Google Yahoo and Bing do. They start at some "seed" page and tehn follow links to build up a graph of what the Internet looks like, searching for keyworks etc. as they go.
* Some stocks traders use them to monitor certain news sites to look into what topics are being talked about to get an idea of which stocks might take off or crash (obviously the data gathered is fed into some pretty complex algorithms).
* Ad Fraud. Websites that have advertising on them get paid by the number of people that view the ads. Some websites fake this traffic using webbots. This is getting more and more common (See: http://www.warc.com/LatestNews/News/Fears_grow_on_online_ad_fraud.news?ID=33030)
Now, as to why you would want a botnet, as opposed to just one bot is either to a.) spread the load (like Google) or b.) so that the traffic does not all look like it is coming from the same place (like the fraudsters). If you are building a botnet entirely behind your router then to the rest of the world it will look as if all of the traffic is coming form one ip address (which it is) unless rout each one through it's own VPN. If you want to do some computationally heavy stuff (like image processing) it might still be worth building the botnet behind your own router.
As to how hard: not too hard. You will need several machines to act as the nodes in the botnet. These are the machines that will load up the webpages and whatever you need to be done with them. You will also need one or more "command" machines which the nodes will talk to to get more work to do or and to communicate back results.
Language: Depends on what you choose to do. If you want to manipulate the pages you load you will certainly need to know some javascript to do that. As for the control machine it all depends on how you want to communicate back to it. If all you are going to do are simple GET and POST requests from the nodes then a simple apache/php/mysql setup should be fine.
The software on the nodes will usually be some kind of hacked up webbrowser. As I have mentioned on this forum before, PhantomJS makes a great choice for this as it will allow you to load up webpages on machines that do not run GUIS. Go and see this more more info: http://phantomjs.org/. It used to be written in C++, but I think they moved it al into python.
And now I realize that I have written a lot, so I will stop there for now.
This is exactly what I needed to know. Thank you.