The Security Eunoia

Aiming to take the fight to the bot herders, a company - SRI International - has released a tool called BotHunter. It is free. The software works by monitoring the communication between compromised hosts on a corporate network and bot-herding computers also known as command & control centres.

BotHunter uses what sounds more like heuristic methods and processes (where detection is based on patterns) or than signatures (where detection is based on known attacks). This is how it works:

A US federal court judge has ruled that taking a cryptographic hash (fingerprinting) of a suspects hard drive constitutes a search and therefore a search warrant should be obtained first.
The judge ruled:
“To derive the hash values of Crist’s [suspect] computer, the government physically removed the hard drive from the computer, created a duplicate image of [...]

CAINE - Computer Aided INvestigative Environment -is a digital forensics project based on Ubuntu Hardy Heron. It comes complete with the full complement of Ubuntu’s traditional Gnome interface. On top of the Ubuntu kernel is an assembly of open source computer forensics tools held together by a perl wrapper. Tools included are:

Grissom Analizer
Automated Image & [...]