Chris Formosa

Not to be confused with that, yes.

Although it did increase our popularity.

The main thing we were interested in, how do we deal with this giant botnet?

We were seeing it was growing at kind of an unchecked pace.

And a botnet of that scale can do a lot of extreme damage.

So one of the challenges we were facing is we didn't know how they were gathering these victims.

The worry is that these networks have millions and millions of IPs, and they don't often have security teams or kind of anybody checking what activity is happening.

So if somebody finds a way to harness these millions of devices, they can use them to do really malicious activity like a large-scale DDoS attack.

Yeah, I can't say enough about Ben.

Ben kind of figured almost all of it out just by himself, which is nothing short of amazing.

The first day we chatted for probably like eight hours straight, just passing notes back and forth.

Eight hours?

Yeah, it was just back and forth, just throwing notes to each other and just, we couldn't stop.

It was just so much fun.

Big Pipes is an incredible group of people who really just want to make the world a lot better.

I'd say Ben's honeypot is the goldmine.

That was the key.

So the idea was there's got to be, we think they're exploiting residential proxy devices.

So the best way to figure out if that's true is make yourself a honeypot and become one.

Here's how Ben set up the trap.