Botnets and Remote Administration Tools Marcial Quinones-Cardona Marcial Quinones-Cardona

My Background with Botnets & RATS When I was younger, I had friends who were into using Botnets and RATS I found myself accessing forums to gain knowledge on using them Used them for about a year, mostly to gain advantage in gaming Also used them to show my friends what things you could do if you had access to someone’s computer I was a victim of being a part of a botnet a few times. Additionally, I have been a victim of Remote Administration Tools too.

What is a Botnet? Botnet is a group of infected computers who are all infected by malicious software, whether it be controlled by a group of people or one individual. Once a hacker has a bunch of infected computers in his arsenal (on his botnet), he/she has the ability to do many harmful things. These include DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks, stealing user data from their computer, and much more.

Are Botnets legal? Technically, yes. Botnets can be used to help websites online. However, hackers have turned a good thing into an evil thing and some people create these tools for profit in which they sell to hackers. While a good Botnet may assist in relaying chats so that the user experience is lightened and more user friendly, there are the malicious illegal botnets that can take complete control over your computer.

Who are the targets of Botnets? You might think that high level companies are the targets of botnets. This might be true in some cases, but these hackers just want to infect as many people as they can. Majority of the attacks are done on IoT (Internet of Things) devices or anything that can easily be breached. Because things like Fridges and even cars now-a-days have weak passwords to protect them, a hacker can easily breach these items.

Remote Admin Tools/Trojans Remote Admin Tools are very similar to botnets in a way. They may be more advanced and complex and you have a wide variety of options to perform that Botnets might not have. With RATs, you have complete access to your “victim’s” computer. You can control their mouse and keyboard, open and close their disc tray, download files onto their computer as well as download their files onto your computer, and much more. There are legal tools in which trained professionals or big companies would use to assist you in any type of computer program issue you are having. These tech companies may ask if they can access your computer remotely and see if they can fix the problem. However, there are the malicious programs as mentioned above that can be used for evil, rather than good.

Remote Admin Tools/Trojans Cont. Unlike Botnets, removing a RAT might be a little harder. The program that was executed runs in the background. These items can be renamed to similar services that Microsoft PCs use so that the user might not even recognize that what they are seeing is actually a malicious program. When creating the stub, which is the infected software the hacker will send to people, these hackers will have the option to choose what directory the virus will go to.

Some Questions to Ask Some questions to ask is how can we prevent these botnet and malicious RAT spreading? Everyday people are targeted based on the things that they like and are tricked into downloading malicious files that they think will benefit them, when they are actually phony. How can we prevent IoT devices to be breached and used for malicious purposes?

Idea to Possibly Prevent these Attacks Botnets and RATs are fairly easy to avoid if you have common sense and knowledge of computers. Simply put, don’t download strange files online, stay away from illegal music and torrenting, and make sure to have some sort of firewall or anti-virus enabled.