Researchers uncover Tor-powered Skynet botnet

net-security.org

63 points·pjonesdotca··8 comments

Rapid7 researchers have recently unearthed an unusual piece of malware that turned out to be crucial to the formation of an elusive botnet - dubbed Skynet by the researchers - whose existence has been documented in a very popular Reddit "I Am A" thread.

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Isn't this blogspam? The original source is https://community.rapid7.com/community/infosec/blog/2012/12/...

What? Using tor to run botnets is nothing new[1]

Edit: Apparently it's the same guy...[2]

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/sq7cy/iama_a_malware_c...

[2] http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/tor-powered-botnet-linked-...

This is why it's helpful to read the link before commenting. This fact is mentioned in the very first sentence of the article.

Edit: The article wasn't changed. The first sentence was there in the original the whole time. The commenter just didn't read the article well enough.

Skynet is the name of a military (leased by them, anyway) satellite communications network used (amongst other things, I believe) to remotely control drones around the world. A naming choice that shows its owners, whilst being engaged in a deadly serious business, aren't completely without a sense of humour...

Most folks associate it with the movie series Terminator.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skynet_%28Terminator%29 : Skynet is a fictional, self-aware artificial intelligence system which features centrally in the Terminator franchise and serves as the franchise's main antagonist ... with its ultimate goal the extinction of the human race ... Skynet was [originally] a computer system developed for the U.S. military by the defense firm Cyberdyne Systems.