BotHunter is a free utility for

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, an ...

, which aims at detecting

botnet A botnet is a group of Internet-connected devices, each of which runs one or more bots. Botnets can be used to perform Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks, steal data, send spam, and allow the attacker to access the device and its conn ...

activity within a network. It does so by analyzing network traffic and comparing it to patterns characteristic of malicious processes. Version 1.7.2 was current . An earlier version ran under

Microsoft Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct upgrade to its predecessors, Windows 2000 for high-end and ...

, but was not mentioned on the Web site after the release of 1.7.2. In order to support this application, the developer,

SRI International SRI International (SRI) is an American nonprofit scientific research institute and organization headquartered in Menlo Park, California. The trustees of Stanford University established SRI in 1946 as a center of innovation to support economic ...

, had collected more than 10,000 samples of malware by 2008. The BotHunter Web site states that the software was made possible in part by a research grant from the

U.S. Army Research Office The U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory (DEVCOM ARL) is the U.S. Army's foundational research laboratory. ARL is headquartered at the Adelphi Laboratory Center (ALC) in Adelphi, Maryland. Its largest singl ...

References

External links

BotHunter website
Computer security software SRI International software {{network-software-stub