Researchers Try to Stalk Botnets Used by Hackers

” The Dell Thunderbird supercomputer used for the Sandia project
has 4,480 Intel microprocessors, far fewer than the million
operating systems the researchers sought to simulate. But they used
“virtual machine” software technology to get each microprocessor to
simultaneously run many instances of a Linux-based component called
a kernel — a basic component of an operating system that
manages communications between software and hardware.

“Because most botnets are written for the Windows operating
system, the researchers are planning to use an open source program
called Wine, making it possible to run Windows-based programs
without actually having the complete Windows operating system. They
said they were not using Windows itself because of the licensing
costs of purchasing one million copies of Windows.”

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