The attackers used a giant network of bots — perhaps as many as one million computers in places as far away as the United States and Vietnam — to amplify the impact of their assault.
One reason for this is that the Russians' efforts tend to be framed as a kind of giant machine, in which talking points generated by the Kremlin are "amplified" through a network of bots, fake Facebook pages, and sympathetic human influencers.
But, the census taker found several competing botnets, and an enormous, sleeping, network of bots called Aidra, which had compromised as many as thirty thousand devices.
Disinformation spread by Russian state media outlets has been amplified on social media using a complex network of bots which the Digital Forensic Research Lab this week showed can be linked directly back to the Twitter accounts of both RT and Sputnik in France.
According to Krebs, the malware used by Lizard Squad to build its network of "stresser bots" has been online since early 2014, and can affect commercial routers at universities and companies as well as homes.
Unfortunately, while generating fake traffic from all kinds of bot networks is big business and accounts for almost a third of all traffic to many sites according to some reports, Google is only filtering out traffic from known bots and spiders.
Based on intrinsic characteristics of bots, we propose a multi-module approach to correlate information from different host- and network-level aspects and design a multi-layered architecture to efficiently coordinate modules to perform heavy monitoring only when necessary.
The legal status of bots is unclear.
