How can I create a research botnet within VMware?

Question

For educational purposes

I am attempting to create a botnet within VMware making use of 3 or 4 machines (So I can attack a 5th virtual machine using this botnet), but the issue I'm facing is I can't find any bots or software which would allow me to accomplish this?

So far I've utilized UFONet but rather than accomplishes something like the above, it utilizes 'Open Redirect' vectors on third party web sites.

Answer 1

Botnets are a large and varied class of software, which do a variety of tasks, so it's not necessarily easy to provide exact examples.

With that said, if you take a typical task of creating Denial of Service conditions in the target system, then it's relatively easy to replicate the actions of a botnet with standard software.

For example say you want to DoS a web server, a standard way to achieve that is to send large quantities of traffic to the target web server port.

So to do that you can use load testing tool such as ab which generate load to a site. Just write a script to start up 3-4 instances and see how your target fairs.

Another example of the concept would be the excellently named Bees with Machine Guns which uses Amazon EC2 instances to provide the systems to carry out the load testing.

Answer 2

There's a network designed for this purpose called DETER, and they both publish a great deal of information and make their "range" available to other researchers. http://deter-project.org/about_deterlab

Answer 3

It's not clear what your intent is or what kinds of attacks you want to carry out, but it sounds like you simply need programs running that are configured to listen to or poll a configurable Command server, which would be one of your VMs. The commands the bots receive then determine their actions towards the victim.

If you are shopping for a source of configurable bots to use, that's a little outside the scope of the site. But you could create your own.

There are a couple options that you could try:

1. Write your own bots (Python makes it easy)
2. Repurpose something like the Meterpreter to act as a bot

As you can see from the first link, Github has some interesting botnet options...