Networks subvertedBy Nick Farrell: Thursday 31 May 2007, 07:19Click here to find out more!P2P NETWORKS are increasingly being used to trick PCs into attacking other machines, according to New Scientist magazine.The trick is to subvert the P2P network so that several connected PCs gang up to attack a single machine to make a DoS attack.Darren Rennick of internet security outfit Prolexic told New Scientist that this sort of attack was happening more often.This form of attack was first mooted when Keith Ross and Naoum Naoumov at the Polytechnic University, in Brooklyn, New York, demonstrated that P2P networks could be used to launch an attack without hijacking any PC.What the hackers do is poison the database, to put bogus entries in that say that a very popular file is located at some target address that you want to attack. The P2P users will start contacting the target computer requesting the popular file until the network goes belly-up.The boffin's claim that even Bit Torrent which splits files up for sharing could be used to mount a DoS attack.More here. µ
