What is a Trinoo program?

Answer 1

trinoo - or more properly trin00 - is a bunch of related computer programs that are used in a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. Computers infected with the trin00 software can be used to flood a site or a network with traffic by having hundreds or even possibly thousands of infected machines constantly sending connection requests. Depending on how the site or network is set up, it either slows to a crawl as the bogus traffic is far heavier than the normal requests, or can flat out crash the site or network as it cant' keep up with the flood of requests. Structurally, the criminal (and make no mistake, this IS criminal activity) will compromise a few very powerful computers and use them as the "Masters" for their attack. Many additional computers (Slaves) are also compromised and the trin00 software is installed on them. The criminal will then send a few commands to the Master computers that cause them to send out triggers to the slaves to start the attack. Typically the criminal will seek out computers with very high bandwidth connections to use as the Master computers; universities, large companies, and government computers are frequent targets of the criminals. The use of Masters to trigger the Slaves helps obfuscate the origins of the attack and help prevent investigators from tracing it back to the perpetrator(s).