14,000 sounds like a big number, until you realise that there's many millions of routers. Asus is not known for backbone routing, so while this might be happening, you have to ask yourself, is this the biggest threat across the internet, or is this article intended to serve another interest?

How about neither?

Are you sure? Those seem like the only two options to me. Clearly the purpose of the article is to convince people to feed their children to the rich.

Seriously, I've seen an increase in these weirdly extremist comments recently. One would have to wonder if they are the ones serving another's interests.

You have to ask yourself, is this comment intended to serve another interest?

KadNap is a sophisticated peer-to-peer design based on Kademlia, a network structure that uses distributed hash tables to conceal the IP addresses of command-and-control servers

How I would love to have enough Networking knowledge to be able to dismantle this system.

That sounds like something that someone who was serving another’s interest would say!

Maybe the interests we serve are the friends we made serving another's interests along the way...to serve interests? Or something like that

I don't think anything Onno said is "extremist", I just think it's so vague that what they think might be happening is indecipherable. Makes it more likely to be rage/engagement bait, imo.

But it's not extreme to think that perhaps, given the current anti-anonymity push among governments worldwide, and the fact this uses DHTs and P2P routing, governments might love to tarnish those things in peoples' minds in order to more readily accept banning of bittorrent, onion routing, TOR, etc, which can help bypass a lot of the dangerous government net restrictions and surveillance being put in place.

Do you think that government intrusion into media, or the existence of online influence campaigns, are "extremist" conspiracies rather than proven realities?

Well the article says the botnet is infecting 14,000 routers and other devices a day. Not that there are only 14k infected routers in the world.

The number of infected routers averages about 14,000 per day, up from 10,000 last August, when Black Lotus discovered the botnet.

I'm not sure, but if cake is being served, count me in.

By extremist, I was referring to the absurdity of the statement. Either it's the end of the world, or the article authors are conspirators. Surely it can't be something simple that isn't on one end of a spectrum. This is what leads to radicalization.

Do you think that government intrusion into media, or the existence of online influence campaigns, are "extremist" conspiracies rather than proven realities?

They are both. An extremism can be real. A conspiracy can be proven true, and in your example it is.

There is no evidence, nor reason to believe, the authors of the article in question are conspirators. There is no reason to believe the contents of the article are intended to be anything more than informational, even if with the inherent bias all authors posess. To perceive it as such would be a sign of extreme radicalization or, as you put it, an "online influence campaign" which would be conveniently set before a midterm election in the US.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting the commenter actually is part of some campaign. I wouldn't know. I do believe its contents are extreme though.

Kademlia

Holy shit I hadn't read that name since the eMule days

It says both things

That's a misreading of what it means. The botnet averages 14,000 routers + IoT devices a day, not new devices per day. Every day, devices cycle in and out of these botnets, so their count is always in flux.

So to be clear, asking whether an article has ulterior motives qualifies as an "extremist" question, in your eyes?

Because that seems a pretty extreme limitation on acceptable critical and contextual interrogation of news, to me. You should always be asking that question, in a world where 90% of news orgs are owned by people with heavy political connections and influence.

The suggestion that the authors of an article have ulterior motives is an extreme position to take, yes.

At no point did I ever say that it's a bad thing to hold that position, nor did I say it's an invalid position, nor did I say it's an incorrect position*. But in the society we live in, that position is pretty extreme

*Edit: as a general claim, and obviously only for trustworthy sources. For this particular article, it is a ridiculous position to take though.

Edit 2: I'm really confused what the point of this is. Are you defending that this article might reasonably be published with ulterior motives? Are you arguing over the semantics of the word "extreme"? Are you defending that the original comment reads like a sane interpretation of the article, even if flawed?

But in the society we live in, that position is pretty extreme.

By what metric? And "Extreme" and "Extremist" are two different words, with different meanings and connotations.

Extreme simply means the far end of a spectrum. Extremist means

having or involving beliefs that most people think are unreasonable and unacceptable

(and that's even avoiding the legal definitions that exist in e.g. the UK that specifically tie "extremist" to violence)

At no point did I ever say that it’s a bad thing to hold that position

Without offering any metric by which to assert that, you most certainly did convey the commonly understood negative connotation by calling it extremist.

I added a second edit it appears after your comment, but repeating it here: what's the point of this? To me it seems like an argument over the semantics of a word which I honestly couldn't care less about. Are you defending that the commenter's comment reads like a sane interpretation of the article?

Nobody here is saying that it's ridiculous to question your sources or try to identify potential bias in articles. Those are things you should always do. That's not what this commenter was doing, though.

That’s not what this commenter was doing, though.

So what do you think there were doing, exactly?

Let's break their comment down, and then you can point out the part that is "extremist".

14,000 sounds like a big number, until you realise that there’s many millions of routers.

This is 100% accurate, especially in the age of Mirai-like IoT botnets. 14k is pretty small nowadays. Variants of Mirai (e.g. Midori and Aisuru) had 300,000+ devices.

Asus is not known for backbone routing

Correct, this is a pretty low-danger botnet due to being low-power consumer devices, even if it's difficult to clean.

so while this might be happening, you have to ask yourself, is this the biggest threat across the internet,

Less fair, because it is still news, and Ars is a tech news site.

or is this article intended to serve another interest?

The part I assume you take issue with, but it's also a completely fair question (and is in fact precisely "telling people to question the purpose and bias of news"). The article made the deliberate choice to name-drop BitTorrent and IPFS, despite them not being related other than them also using DHTs. I understand the writer may not have been intending to draw a "malware <-> bittorrent" association in the readers' minds... or they may have. It's sort of like saying, "the killer drove an Audi, much like Nico Hulkenberg". That's why you have to critically question news.

what’s the point of this? To me it seems like an argument over the semantics of a word which I honestly couldn’t care less about

The point is that you immediately jumped to calling them an "extremist" for what seems a pretty innocuous (if not particularly useful) comment. We generally assume good-faith around here, and calling people "extremist" for questioning an Ars article doesn't seem like that to me.

I’m a network engineer and I’m not entirely sure what’s going on. The ip addresses would be visible at some point or it wouldn’t work. I assume they’ve done the simple thing and ran a packet capture but a good chance it’s running through VPN so who knows

The final question presents a false dichotomy that it is the end of the internet or that the authors are pushing an agenda. This is a belief "that most people think [is] unreasonable and unacceptable" (as you put it) in the context of this specific article, which is what their comment was in response to.

I have no issue with anything that precedes that, obviously.

I assume the goal is to make it so the c2 server(s) are basically indistinguishable from any other node, perhaps by making much more inter-node traffic than is strictly necessary. Couple this with almost all the participating IP addresses belonging to innocent parties (since it's malware) and I'm not sure how one would identify the true origin of commands