Talk:Mariposa botnet

Start

This doesn't say when the botnet was formed. When did it start? — Rlevse • Talk • 18:52, 7 August 2010 (UTC)

Always difficult to estimate, let alone reliably source. By its nature a botnet is illegal, which means that the owners tend to prefer to keep it hidden - after all, a detected botnet can be counteracted and that is generally undesirable (For example, the creators of the Asprox botnet have been known to shrink their botnet to reduce the amount of attention it would attract). Other botnets start growing silently at first, infecting programs with trojan horses in order to spread and increase the botnets size, but taking no other overt actions that could lead to an early death. Another issue is that some trojans (Such as mariposa's) are sold to various people, which makes it difficult to differentiate between various botnets. Hence, the Kraken and Bobax botnets are suspected to be the same by various security firms.

The botnets that do list a creation date on Botnet are generally estimates, or dates at which the first anti-virus definitions were releases. In some cases reverse engineering offers some clues as well. Even so, the "Founding" date is incredibly difficult to determine (As said - some botnets are found to be dormant for months gathering strength). This is why this article lists the discovery date - thats as accurate as it gets if you wish clear sources. Any "Creation" date would be inaccurate at best, and even more difficult to source. Excirial ^{(Contact me,Contribs)} 19:21, 7 August 2010 (UTC)

Understand that but I was figuring that since they were discovered at least some rough idea of their formation had been uncovered. Yes, it's a shady area. — Rlevse • Talk • 19:50, 7 August 2010 (UTC)

Sometimes there are some estimates - but in this case i couldn't really find a source that explicitly stated this as such. Another problem is that these estimates can widely vary across sources and companies, which would lead to a messy article stating multiple dates. In this particular case we might be in luck though - since the operators were arrested their testimonies might contain some documentation detailing the start date. Excirial ^{(Contact me,Contribs)} 19:56, 7 August 2010 (UTC)

External links modified

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External links modified

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