xkcd: The malware aquarium
Today on the marvellous geek webcomic xkcd, a great idea for a nerdy alternative to an aquarium: a collection of virtual Windows machines connected to the net without any firewalls, infected with every conceivable virus, a seething pit of virtual life. This would make a killer product -- a great Christmas present that could run on older, slower hardware. The breeders would have to tend them carefully to ensure that they catch a really interesting collection of malware, though. Link
See also:
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I agree that it's funny in concept...but I hope that you're kidding (and, perhaps more to the point, that Randall is). The world does not need more completely exposed computers to be incorporated into botnets.
(If you could completely disable _outgoing_ network connections--maybe.)
It reminds me of a Core War's tournament, with dozens of geeks fascinating by red, white and green pixels moving on a screen :)
I maded U a botnet, hope U liek it!
@#1, why create new ones? When you can reuse what spammers also use. :)
Cory, do you realize you spoiled the punchline?
Thus, our hero created the WWW's version of the appendix.
Thinkgeek had a similar joke a few years ago as a fake April Fools product: Pet Viruses.
I have to also insist that anybody actually trying this disable all outgoing packets. Only allow incoming packets (so viruses can come in). If that isn't possible, then we'll have to leave this idea for the comic realm. (What would be best would be to have no outside connection whatsoever, and to introduce the viruses one by one as you would fish species in a real aquarium.)
Not only would leaving outgoing traffic open mean that your aquarium is trying to infect other people, but the sheer amount of traffic coming out of your aquarium bots would almost certainly get your connection shut off by your ISP.
All that said.... I would pay top dollar if somebody built a turnkey solution for this where you can just download the aquarium and download the various inhabitants, and watch what happens.
I want one.
Set up a business where every month you send an install CD containing the new viruses (viri?). At that point, you've got a subscription service and you keep the PCs offline. Sell Antivirus (or other) advertising on the CD packaging and you're set.
The install disks could even have the capacity to kill any outgoing connection in case the user has an outgoing connection.
"Virus aquariums" exist and indeed have to have all outbound traffic disabled. Anti-virus companies, for example, use them for research: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeypot_(computing)
Botnets are an incredibly cool distributed programming paradigm (literally "the network is the computer"), and could be used for much more than DDoS. Just as there are many other uses for fork() than fork-bombs.
Maybe kids now who will play Will Wright's Spore soon will understand that intuitively when they begin to write software a few years later.