VIEW 5
Symbiogenesis and botnets
When you think of evolution, what image first springs to mind? Maybe a hall in a natural history museum filled with fossils of dinosaurs and saber-toothed tigers, or a diorama with apes and early hominids. But there is something wrong with this picture—it’s just depicting animal evolution, which means it is only telling part of the story. Life on Earth started four billion years ago but the first animals evolved 0.5 billion years ago, halfway through the last quarter of the game.
Historically, most evolutionary biologists came from a background in zoology; their expertise was in the comparative study of animals. They established the mainstream view that the creation of new species is a divergent process; just as twigs and branches diverge from the trunk of a tree. Lynn Margulis (1938–2011) was different. She was a microbiologist who focused on the evolution of eukaryotic cells (cells with a nucleus) and became convinced that the scientific consensus was wrong.
She believed that evolution was driven by the symbiotic cooperation of organisms: the competitors in the race worked together rather than competed with each other. She wrote a paper3 in 1967 arguing that new species were created by a process of fusion and merger. She called this process “symbiogenesis.” Then… nothing happened. Her paper was completely ignored for decades.
A single cell is more complex than you might imagine; it’s more than a nucleus in a little sack of protoplasm. The diagram shows that there are 13 different entities inside it. The crucial evidence to support Margulis’s theory came when scientists discovered that some of these entities had DNA that was different from the nucleus.
The DNA of mitochondria, chloroplasts, basal granules, and plastids is not the same as the DNA in the nucleus. This implies that a cell, the fundamental building block of all animals, is a fusion of different bacteria-like creatures.
At some time in the past, a group of various bacteria clumped together to form a eukaryotic cell. That eukaryotic cell was dramatically more successful than the individuals composing it and swiftly became the basis of all higher life-forms. Professor Margulis’s once heretical views are now scientific orthodoxy.
The gathering of individual elements into a cooperative whole in the cyber domain can have more sinister overtones. A botnet is a network of computers infected by malware that comes under the control of a single attacking party.
The controller can then use this army of slave machines to perform Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, for mining cryptocurrency or sending out a blizzard of spam. The Conficker worm (and its variants) is probably the most famous botnet malware, which has infected millions of computers in more than 190 countries since first detection in 2008.
Botnets are increasingly being rented out as a commodity to criminals, a sign of the increasing specialization and division of labor in the cyber ecosystem. The most lucrative use of botnets today is in ad fraud, generating revenue through bogus clicks on Google ads. Juniper Research4 estimated this type of fraud to be worth $44 billion in 2022.
