A recent story today about discussions for an official defense Botnet in the USA prompted me to post a question I’ve been asking for the last year. Are some of the world’s botnets secretly run by intelligence agencies, and if not, why not?
Some estimates suggest that up to 1/3 of PCs are secretly part of a botnet. The main use of botnets is sending spam, but they are also used for DDOS extortion attacks and presumably other nasty things like identity theft.
But consider this — having remote control of millions of PCs, and a large percentage of the world’s PCs seems like a very tempting target for the world’s various intelligence agencies. Most zombies are used for external purposes, but it would be easy to have them searching their own disk drives for interesting documents, and sniffing their own LANs for interesting unencrypted LAN traffic, or using their internal state to get past firewalls.
Considering the billions that spy agencies like the NSA, MI6, CSEC and others spend on getting a chance to sniff signals as they go over the wires, being able to look at the data all the time, any time as it sits on machines must be incredibly tempting.
And if the botnet lore is to be accepted, all this was done using the resources of a small group of young intrusion experts. If a group of near kids can control hundreds of millions of machines, should not security experts with billions of dollars be tempted to do it?
Of course there are legal/treaty issues. Most “free nation” spy agencies are prohibited from breaking into computers in their own countries without a warrant. (However, as we’ve seen, the NSA has recently been lifted of this restriction, and we’re suing over that.) However, they are not restricted on what they do to foreign computers, other than by the burdens of keeping up good relations with our allies.
However, in some cases the ECHELON loophole may be used, where the NSA spies on British computers and MI-6 spies on American computers in exchange.
More simply, these spy agencies would not want to get caught at this, so they would want to use young hackers building spam-networks as a front. They would be very careful to assure that the botting could not be traced back to them. To keep it legal, they might even just not take information from computers whose IP addresses or other clues suggest they are domestic. The criminal botnet operators could infect everywhere, but the spies would be more careful about where they got information and what they paid for.
Of course, spy agencies of many countries would suffer no such restrictions on domestic spying.
Of all the spy agencies in the world, can it be that none of them have thought of this? That none of them are tempted by being able to comb through a large fraction of the world’s disk drives, looking for both bad guys and doing plain old espionage?
That’s hard to fathom. The question is, how would we detect it? And if it’s true, could it mean that spies funded (as a cover story) the world’s spamming infrastructure?
