The Deadly P2P Trojan Approach: PhatBot

Phatbot is a kind of "Trojan horse," a type of program named after the legendary stealth attack because it let hackers take quiet control of unsecured computers. Phatbot has raised substantial concern because it represents a leap-forward in its sophistication and is proving much harder for law enforcement authorities and antivirus companies to eliminate. Like traditional Trojan horse programs, Phatbot infects a computer through one of several routes, such as through security flaws in Microsoft's Windows operating system or through "backdoors". But because Phatbot links infected computers into a larger network, hackers can issue orders to the infected machines through many routes, and cyber-security officials can only effectively shut down a Phatbot attack if they track down every infected computer. "The concern here is that the peer-to-peer like characteristics of these 'bot networks may make them more resilient and more difficult to shut down". "With these P2P Trojan networks, even if you take down half of the affected machines, the rest of the network continues to work just fine," said Mikko Hypponen, director of F-Secure, an antivirus software company based in Finland.