Having spent hours disinfecting both work and personal machines, the danger of botnets is all too apparent. With some networks estimated to contain upwards of a quarter of a million machines, mitigation against DDOS attacks has become a major headache. With this in mind, three researchers at the University of Washington have suggested a novel method of deflecting the traffic - fighting the evil botnets with good ones...

Whilst the first thought that this might bring to mind is some sort of poor knock-off Transformers episode, the technology is available now, and the argument pretty persuasive. The main drawback seems to be getting the end user to install the software in the first place. There is certainly a market for this sort of software, and there exists amongst the wider community a willingness to participate. Coupled with a publicity campaign similar to SETI@home, we may be about to see a shift in power at a packet level...

You can download a copy of the abstract here.