Slashdot Mirror
Taking On A Spammer
_QED was the first of an onslaught of users to submit a story about a programmer who got his domain forged by a spammer and took action. I don't know if this is real and I'm certainly not suggesting doing this yourself, but this is an extremely interesting story.
I don't see any obvious reason to believe that this site is fake. People here are complaining about it not having enough technical details, but they don't seem to realize that the spammers are out there reading this site as well. Now what do you think would frighten your average spammer (they aren't known for being too bright) more? A detailed explanation of exactly how this guy socially engineered his way into these computers or a menacing but vague description of his "stealthy hacking" full of colorful adjectives and small words? In the first case, Billy Joe Bob Spammer will just say to himself "Well gee-whiz, I'll just be sure not to fall for [fill in the blank]!" while in the second he's left thinking "OH NO!! HACKERS ARE JUSS LIKE IN THE MOO-VEES!!"
~ =
As for the people who are wondering why he doesn't publish this on his own web site under his own name, e-mail address, home telephone number and social security number -- have you even for one second considered the fact that what he did was CLEARLY ILLEGAL?
Anyway, this spammer DOES exist. I actually first found out about this page from a recent post to the SPAM-L mailing list. Here is the first and third posts on that thread:
Subject: Nuke: from alts.net
Date: Mon, 5 Jun 2000 09:51:47 -0700
From: "Hart, Andrew"
To: SPAM-L@PEACH.EASE.LSOFT.COM
4601 W. Sahara looks very familar, but I didn't find
an abundance of recent NANAS hits against it.
-----Original Message-----
From: Technical Support [mailto:support@alts.net]
Sent: Wednesday, May 31, 2000 7:02 PM
To: *******@aol.com; TOSspam@aol.com; abuse@verio.net; abuse@alts.net;
tech@connectcorp.net
Cc: nanas-sub@cybernothing.org; spamrecycle@chooseyourmail.com
Subject: Re: [Email] Spam: Free Rate Quote!
Thank you for notifying us of this spammer. Our policies do NOT allow bulk emailings in any way. The account free-cybermarket.com has been terminated effective 10:00PM EDT 31 May 2000.
Best Regards
ALTS, LLC ABUSE
abuse@alts.net
At 08:50 PM 5/31/00 , *******@aol.com wrote:
URL: http://www.free-cybermarket.com/m/index.html
Dropbox: mailto:ulistsrvcs@fr.fm?subject=unsubscribe
FROM mail-abuse.org TO www.free-cybermarket.com.
traceroute to free-cybermarket.com (161.58.232.252), 30 hops max, 40 byte
packets
...
7 vwh0.dca.verio.net (129.250.30.166) 89.765 ms 91.406 ms 89.846 ms
8 free-cybermarket.com (161.58.232.252) 89.429 ms 89.517 ms 89.734 ms
Query: free-cybermarket.com
Sunrise Beach Inc. (FREE-CYBERMARKET-DOM)
4601 W. Sahara
Las Vegas, NV 89122
US
Domain Name: FREE-CYBERMARKET.COM
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact, Zone Contact, Billing Contact:
Enterprises Inc., SunRise (SE4175) sunrise@CONNECTCORP.NET
SunRise Enterprises Inc.
4601 W. Sahara
Las Vegas , NV 89102
NONE GIVEN (FAX) NONE GIVEN
Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.ALTS.NET 192.41.1.48
NS2.ALTS.NET 161.58.9.48
Details on NANAS
=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=
J. Andrew Hart
Subject: Re: Nuke: from alts.net
Date: Mon, 5 Jun 2000 10:50:18 -0700
From: Jay Hennigan
To: SPAM-L@PEACH.EASE.LSOFT.COM
On Mon, 5 Jun 2000, Hart, Andrew wrote:
> > 4601 W. Sahara looks very familar, but I didn't find
> > an abundance of recent NANAS hits against it.
Seems to me that address turns up in the ICQ logs of Rodona Garst,
the posting of which kept me up all night reading. Fascinating stuff.
http://belps.freewebsites.com/
http://premier.cluelessfucks.com/
--
Jay Hennigan - Network Administration - ***@****.***
NetLojix Communications, Inc. NASDAQ: NETX - http://www.netlojix.com/
WestNet: Connecting you to the planet. 805 884-6323
You can't really blame those PR people - maximizing your exposure for a minimum of expense is a basic goal of any marketing campaign. Spam is an example of a market failure, wherein otherwise beneficial free-market forces encourage behaviour which causes negative externalities (just like a manufacturing plant has an incentive to dump pollutants cheaply). Sure the spammer gets their message out, and might generate some revenue off that, but everybody else carries the expense of unnecessary traffic, pissed off users, etc.
The question is, how best to deal with this situation. Sure, this guy probably should have "changed the names to protect the (presumed until proven guilty) innocent," but would anybody have believed him in that case?
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Sure, it's possible.
Not to turn Slashdot into a cracker training school, but here's one way.
Assume the Windows box has file sharing turned on and is poorly secured. Prepare yourself a back orifice binary, and place it in C:\WINDOWS\Start Menu\Programs\StartUp. OK, now you say, "But that doesn't take effect until she reboots." Fine, use one of the many readily available "Ping of Death" type tools to freeze up the machine. Bingo. She hits the reset switch and your nice little "remote admin tool" is now up and running. (since she's on AOL, take the appropriate steps to ensure that her new IP is made known to you when she reconnects.)
That's the simple version. Believe me, I've been in the position of defending machines and networks against similar attacks, and the things he's claiming to have done would not be that hard to pull off on the typical home users unsecured machine.
If he knew how to do that he'd be a novelist, not a hacker.
Can't remember though if it will start immediately on installation, or if it needs to wait for a Windows restart (like everything else !)
Well, since you can execute code on the taget machine (that's how you got BackOrfice installed, right?), what's to prevent you from executing BackOrfice immediately after installation?
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
I thought a lobotomy was a prerequisit of using MS products! :)
Blar.
I have to agree with you. I am suspicious of how he hacked them... he provided all other details, why not these?
Now I didn't recognize one of the icons in the systray, I believe it was second from the left. The computer one with some kind of slice thingy. None of those others provide remote access to screen/keyboard. I didn't see any VNC Server there, nada. Now that icon may be a PC/Anywhere icon but I don't use that software and don't recognize it.
Anyway I'd like to see some more proof.
BTW: If this story is true: Great. I hope the spammers have a lifetime of grief bundled into the next couple weeks. They deserve every measure of it. If it's untrue, however, this "Man in the Wilderness" should be subjected to a swimming pool full of double-edged razor blades.
Unless "She" had her C drive shared with no password, which is unlikely
Not only is it NOT unlikely, it's actually quite common.
even if it is, you have to admit - a lot of effort would be put in making up those icq logs [100xs of pages]
--- d'oh
So the spammer's machine just happened to be running BO/NetBus/PCAnywhere? That sounds too convienient, and why did he word it that he "hacked" into the computer?
This story sounds something like you'd see on TV or the movies, where everybody's computer is "hackable" and you can see what they are doing on their computer in realtime.
Let me guess, he typed a command on the spammers computer saying "ACCESS ALL OF THE SECRET FILES" in huge letters and got everything he needed.
With apologies to Tom Lehrer.
. When you show up in a country that (despite what anyone says) is run like the Wild West, stealing a few horses is going to get you in trouble. No matter how normal it is in any other place you've done business.
What is disturbing to me is that all we have is this guy's word. Now I happen to believe him, but what if this whole thing turned out to be a clever and malicious hack taken out at these folks' expense?
Where there is no justice, I have no problem with the quickest gun carving out his own revenge. But it would be better if there were something like due process and independent review of evidence, and impartially and uniformly implemented punishment, rather than a system of self appointed judge/jury/executioners. That way the little guy and the inexperienced get justice too.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
To elaborate on this point:
there are 95 icq logs, spanning over 2.5 megs, all of text. This is *51000* lines of text! This would take huge amounts of time and effort to forge in any consistent manner, which they seem to be. I agree the methodologies that he described are pretty vague, but he got these logs somewhere, as well as a ridiculous amount of email. And if they are all real, the person who wrote them is obviously a hardcore spammer.
Did you even READ the ICQ logs???????
These low-lifes routinely INSTALLED PCAnywhere on their machines so they could work from their laptops in bed!!!! Getting in was a no-brainer!! And they didn't know sh*t about the technology!!! They had a revolving door of script kiddies that had to set up their systems!!! They only knew what the script kiddies taught them!!
And check out some of the other URLs mentioned - they are all there! (like silver-shamrock.com)
"We have heard the BS alarm.....and it is you!!!"
If you have a problem with spam, FIRST, secure the domains with Nessus.
THEN, configure your mail server to bounce mail with broken headers.
THEN, follow the Advanced Networking HOW-TO to set the queue for TCP connections to port 25 to a much smaller value.
Finally, only accept connections from hosts with a valid IDENT response.
Chances are, your average spammer won't be capable of forging any e-mail that can pass through even rudimentary security, such as this, without having to reveal their true name & true e-mail address. Something your typical spammer is unlikely to do.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It was PC Anywhere that did her in.
she's using icq
.oO0Oo.
and left sharing open
simple install subseven on her machine
not heard of it?
nvr mind
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Yeah, these losers have been filling my mailbox up with crud, too.
I was looking forward to e-mailing the creator of this website to congratulate him for his wonderful efforts, but when I pointed the mouse over the e-mail link, I noticed I'd be e-mailing myself. D'Oh!
Oh man, I don't think I've ever laughed so hard while being so angry. It's the weirdest combination of emotions.
I can't get over what illiterate schlump she is, especially from her screen shots. (I guess Windows' poor security is a good thing after all...)
Dude, I know you're out there, and I'm sure you probably read Slashdot at least occasionally. Thank you for taking the risk to stand up for what is right... even if it's technically illegal.
I suggest that we set up a legal defence fund for this guy, just in case he ever gets caught. How's a little Slashdot charity sound? If we combine our resources, I'm sure he could hire OJ's lawyers - and if they could get OJ off, they can get anyone off.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
anyway, here's a bit of extra fact:
"Pump & Dump" Claim
Mark Rice Insider Info
So he does exist, and he did want to trade 50,000 shares. Of course the problem with good lies is they are often half-true.
Well, it depends on how strictly you want to define "right after". I'd say within 5 minutes would still qualify, and that's plenty of time to copy the binary into the startup folder and hit the machine with a ping of death to force a reboot.
Not that the PC Anywhere theory is implausible, I'm just making the point that it wouldn't be too much more difficult to get the same access even without getting lucky.
Got a message back from the "Great Man" himself, with his claims of being anti-spam, &c., &c., blah, blah, blah. Truth be told, I never heard from that spammer again -- nor any other that I could trace through Wallace, since then. (This is in the context of 300+ confirmed kills for 1999, and over 200 so far this year.)
Kinda cool, though, putting a tick-mark on my SPAM can to represent that kill. :-)
Liberty in our Lifetime
Whenever we receive SPAM mail, I send this reply:
The Windmill e-Mail Parsing System(c) indicates that the message you have sent is an advertisement, commonly known as SPAM mail. If your message is NOT Spam, please click your e-mail program's "Reply" button and re-send your message.
If your message IS Spam, be advised that this is a Business E- Mail address, and and as such costs money to maintain.
Your e-mail costs us money.
Any further advertisements sent to this address will be invoiced to your firm at $5.00 per message. The act of sending further e-mail messages to this address is considered acceptance of this billing arrangement.
MIS Department
Accounts Receivable
If they send us more SPAM, I send them this:
Please consider this your invoice for $5.00.
Reply promptly with information regarding your preferred payment method. You will not be invoiced for any e-mails exchanged regarding your account.
Your Customer Number is SPM23975, please use your customer number in all correspondence with ETS, Inc.
Have a nice day.
Accounts Payable
Nothing has ever come of it, but it makes me feel better.
Matthew Miller,
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
it's not that unlikely? a quick scan with a smbscanner will come up with a bunch of open hard drives waiting to be poked around on. You'd be amazed how much porn (in hidden subdirs), warez and mp3's the average dsl user keeps on their hard drive.
sometimes they even have their printer shared so you can send them messages
And it looks like they're using Windoze and haven't got their DNS set up properly:-
Better yet, go find yourself a copy of Stevespam, one of the best .mod files I've ever heard!
I guess I'm kinda dating myself here... I was deep into BBSes when this song came out. Wow I kinda miss "Dial attempt #322..." on Telix. :-)
There does seem to be too much hype and too few details to the story. A questionable point in my mind: Just how does one track a user to an IP address based on email? Unless you control the originating SMTP server (hence you could cull the logs), it must be very difficult to resolve a user down to an IP... in this story, the return domain was forged but the originating SMTP was stolen from an unrelated service, so how is the spammer IP address resolved?
Discovering the originating IP address from the headers of a given message is trivial. Most SMTP MTAs record the IP of the client connection in a Received: line. All one need do is examine the first non-forged Received: line in the message header.
If you took a screenshot of my game machine right now, it would show ICQ Netdetect offline and AIM offline. Why? I use GAIM and LICQ, but they're installed on the 98 machine, and it is connected right to the net right now. Maybe she was offline by choice? M'kay.
I like music
I'd have thought people could set up an entire business catching spammers. ISP's spend a lot of money blocking spam. If there were enough people working full time the problem could probably be reduced quite drastically.
It's a nice "story"... but it reads like a copy of Takedown - all sensationalism. Anybody else notice this? It's gotta be a fake, or at least exagurated (sp?).
Visit
Hey, let's start a Rodona Garst fanclub !!!
Domain Name: PREMIERSERVICES.COM Registrar: NETWORK SOLUTIONS, INC. Whois Server: whois.networksolutions.com Referral URL: www.networksolutions.com Name Server: NS2.HOST4BIZ.NET Name Server: NS.HOST4BIZ.NET Updated Date: 03-mar-2000 >>> Last update of whois database: Wed, 7 Jun 00 06:18:55 EDT
Taking law into your own hands is _always_ wrong.
.oO0Oo.
Like the French Resistance during WW2
or the American Revolution
the government takes the law into it's own hands.
What's so different about yours?
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
We need a technological solutions to this problem, not a legislative. If there was no method to fake e-mail then this wouldn't be a problem.
That "bitchslapping page" in your .sig sure was an interesting read! I just wanted to encourage you to keep it online for others to read, as it may prove helpful, just as you said.
Just my 2 cents.
Slagborr
Freewebsites.com is slashdotted already. Already! Anybody mirrored it?
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
As for anonymity on the net, I'm actually for it. I also for a more secure network. And I have no problem with blocking sites and users that break the rules without needing to find out who they are. However, if this story is true, the spammers in question made no attempt to be anonymous. They revealed who they are through publically accessable information. Too bad.
I have read a couple of suggestions for persistent anonymous identities on the net. People can decide whether to do business with you based on the reputation of your anonymous identity. That would require a couple of important components:
Certainly, there would be nothing to stop people from maintaining multiple identities or creating new ones on a whim. However, if your reputation was your ticket to transactions on the net (buying, selling, possibly even working), it would be worth a lot. Set your threshold at 2 and refuse to talk to the ACs and new users. The choice would be yours.
The bottom line on anonymity is that in a sense, true anonymity is impossible. To achieve that, it would have to be impossible to link anything I say or do to anything else about me. That would mean that every e-mail message, every web page, every Usenet post would be a disconnected entity. That isn't useful, and probably isn't possible.
What is useful is when I can go online and seek information about a medical condition I think I may have without leaving a trail that insurers can link to me as a customer. If they want to know something about my medical history that's fine. They should have to ask me. They can refuse to insure me if I refuse to divulge it. Limits on the scope of legitimate questions are a matter for the legal system.
Anonymous identities are most useful when they allow two-way communication. That requires persistence. And that means that they are subject to retaliation for their actions. The retaliation is simply limited to what you can do to an anonymous ID. You can wreck its reputation so that others won't do business with it. With a strong mechanism to accomplish that, imagine what would quickly happen to spammers. If we could identify them as spammers within minutes of the first offense, and nearly everyone used filters that would then refuse mail from them, how much of a business could they build?
Imagine if it became public knowledge that they had engaged in a pump-and-dump scam before the markets opened the morning after they sent their e-mail. Would you want to be a spammer holding 100,000 shares eVapor.com when NASDAQ halts trading on it because the pump-and-dump is reported before the opening bell? Watch the $80,000 you put into it turn into a complete loss.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
We must have Universal laws for such occasions, these laws must be exactly the same accross the boundaries of different countries, everyone should know that it is impossible to run away from the law by switching location. Once there is an agreement between all the countries about the universality of computer crime related laws, then death penalty should be reinforced for the following crimes:
1. Spamming email accounts
2. Spamming mobile phones
3. Spamming in all other forms
4. Hijacking and/or forgering domain names.
For everything else it should be 'life'.
For using M$ products it should be lobotomy.
You can't handle the truth.
The blurb for this story didn't contain any warning about "the usual hacker/cracker misnaming applies". Does that mean slashdot has grown up and moved on to more important matters, or is CmdrTaco asleep at the wheel?
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Ok, so assuming PC Anywhere, VNC, or BO is installed, how did this so called "hacker" figure out one of the maachines he hacked was a laptop in a bedroom? Either this is totally made up or this guy used to work for these people and is trying to get even with them.
It is a really good story, though!
But here's a potential loophole (unless I'm totally wrong in my figures, which I could be...someone please recheck):
The screenshot says she was sending 3,522 e-mails per hour. That's just under 58 e-mails per second. She was supposedly using a throwaway AOL dial-up account. (The frac T1, it was said, was not used for sending spams.) Even if the laptop had dual-channel ISDN, the maximum she could spew just under 16 kilobytes per second. This would mean the size of the e-mail would have to be 282 bytes. That's enough for maybe just over four lines of text. The examples provided on the site had multiple paragraphs of text and bulleted-item lists in the spam-mails.
It doesn't add up. She **might** get 58 spams per second if #1) there was no bandwidth wasted to pesky things like TCP/IP headers and SMTP commands, #2) there were no rejected spams, #3) she had a dual-channel ISDN connection with compression for her AOL dial-up, and #4) the spam-mails were very small.
I really find it hard to believe that AOL offers dual-channel ISDN with compression and that Rodona coincidentally has an ISDN adapter for her laptop and the spams she happened to be sending when the screenshot was taken were uncharacteristically small.
But I absolutely **love** the story. Should've been a book. I really, really hope that it's true!
Doug ---- Co-host of Ghostly Talk
WTF are you talking about?
.{redmist}.
---------------- but the MINUTE they get spammed, they are all shouting about accountability and how we need better records of who is using the internt. -----------------
He didn't once start whining about accountability. He just cracked them and MADE them accountable.
-------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------
That's not something I'd want to admit to on a public forum where photographs of this woman's breasts are available :-)
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
Now *that* would be funny. Server the revenge page from the harddrives of the victim. And they'd never figure it out, until they were slashdotted. Heh. Check the IP he gives, maybe the C: drive is still available? Not that I'm suggesting anyone *actually* do this..... OK, maybe I am.
carlos
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
From what he's saying, they aren't using open relay on HIS machine, they're using open relay on someone elses machine, and using his domain in the return address fields. In fact, it looks like the software she uses IS her mailserver, she just feeds it the addresses and it goes, using the reply to: address that she specifies. Now I'm gonna go get 1st Class Mail and play around to make sure I'm not 100% full of crap.
I like music
Hrm. I would think that the screenshot happened *after* he breached the machine....Maybe we should ask him. Oh. Wait. Nevermind.
I have experience as a Network Admin at a site where we had to send out tens of thousands of emails each day to everyone who played our game to tell them if they won the prize or not. Yes, it was spam but at least it was spam that people knew full well they were gonna get when they played the game. Sending out 100,000 emails took a dual 600 VALinux machine with a gig of RAM a few hours even with Qmail tweaked to hell and sitting in a more-bandwidth-than-god co-lo. Sending a million emails via a windows laptop via an AOL dial up account would take the better part of a week, I would think, at least. Considering that, as far as I could tell, the article only meantions emails being sent from this laptop, and presumably other associates with similar setups, I find it VERY difficult to believe that they REALLY could have been sending out this volume. This makes me seriously doubt that any of this is real. Made a really good joke though.
actually, the signature stuff is real. check the SPAM-L archives.. we've been tracking the "mail. " spammer for a few weeks. i've got plenty of procmail sh*te to id signatures in spam i get (by mailer, by x-headers, by message-id format, etc, etc) and i /could/ have it page me during a run if i wanted to. i'm not saying this is real, but its its a joe job, this guy's a f*cking psycho who had enough time to type up hundreds of pages of logs. so no, i dont think it's fake. -chris ps: here's my mirror http://cow.org/~noise/
But there is the insider, ex-boyfriend, bitter custody battle, disgruntled ex-employee, angle that is plausible.
HAhahahahahahaha! BWAAAAHAHHAHAAHAHAHAH! Oh man, hahahaahahahaha. That was DAMN funny. Hoo-whee. That got my funny bone a goin. Slapped my momma! HAHAHAAHAHAHA!! COMBAT BOOTS! AAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAAH!!! Oh yeah, good stuff. Classic.
- Rev.hahahahaha
Why just BO? Many offices use PC Anywhere to allow the sysadmin to keep track of users and systems, as well as to provide better tech support to users in other buildings in their complexes where aplicable. Some lazy sysadmins install it to keep from having to walk all the way down the hall. And PC Anywhere is way to easy to crack. I dunno about you, but personally I think that this seems a little more plausible (less implausable?) than finding/installing BO.
-Ma Tin Yuan
Who doesn't make the decisions, and doesn't like them, but carries them out, because, as a slave to capitolism, he loves his paycheck.
Your calculations are inaccurate because in a single email you can specify more then one To line. So if you need to send 100,000 emails to hotmail - put 5 address each time on the to line (RCPT TO: actually) and you can speed up your send rate 5 times.
-Ariel
Hey, when the lights are out, all that matters are a lady's natural skills, and she was VERY skilled..... ;P~
Matthew Miller,
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Regards, Ralph.
Your idea about sending a fake bill to spammers is a very BAD idea. By sending them email, you verify your existence. Once your address is verified as "legit", what happens? You get more spam. For the same reason, never click on their "click here to opt out" links!
I'd advise using Spamcop (spamcop.net) The free part of SpamCop un-obfuscates the email header information, then allows you to automagically send a letter of complaint to the appropriate authorities. Personally, I've seen several accounts (email and website) disappear after I've used Spamcop against them. It's quite satisfying. Spamcop also has a fee-service for filtering email (which I haven't tried yet).
I hope this helps!
Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
I am not so bothered by the writer's smugness in writing -- this guy may not be a skilled writer after all -- as the information he offers. You may notice that the alleged spammers listed there appear to be all (or mostly) female. Certainly, the photos are all of women, and the "kinky stories" seem (I did not read them all) pointed in that general direction. There is a possibility that these pages are neither benign altruism nor an exercise in self-congratulation. Rather, the site could be an elaborate, sexually motivated scheme to harrass these women, especially "Rodona". If Slashdotters could be manupilated into harrassing them, "so much the better".
It is hard to determine the motive or actual circumstances from available information. There is too much uncertainty for me to actually make an accusation. One can think up a whole bunch of other possible motivations: the women-looking-for-attention theory, the disgruntled-ex-employee theory, the let's-make-Slashdotters-look-silly theory, the I-want-attention theory, etc. The guy could really be telling the truth and wants to do the net a service. I only want to point out the possibility that Slashdotters are being manupilated into harrassing possibly innocent victims.
I honestly don't know. Having read the execrable Takedown--an exciting technological drama buried beneath a steaming pile of self-aggrandizing*, luridly written shite--I'm much more prepared to believe this than I otherwise would have been.
*(on the parts of both Shimomura and Markoff; I'm not taking sides. They're both jerks.)
spawn_of_yog_sothoth
Heh.. when I used to work at a large colocation provider/backbone it was unbelievable how many of them would send spam to noc@
"Rodona Garst" Anagrams
-----------------------
Tornado Rags
Dragon Roast
Sargon-Tardo
and the obvious
Arson God/Rat
Can you imagine when Rhonda's kid takes her for show and tell?
"So Timmy, what does your mother do?"Then he can say, "My mom spams your parent's email account with porn."
Wow... I bet parent/teacher confrences are a riot there...
You say you want a revolution?
not true.. you can have an envelope w/ 20 recipients, sometimes more depending on the MTA. the content-lenght was 1043, or about 44 bytes. you have 65,000 ports open to send outgoing mail on to various outbound relay servers. sending 10,000+ messages a MINUTE is not unfeasable for 128k frac-t1.
Not just cancel their accounts and black-list them (which we already do). But, we should post pictures of them making asses of themselves (like the picture of Rodana flashing her tits). The police have started using this technique to cut down on prostitution in some cities. They set up a sting operation and post the pictures publically of all the dudes who get busted trolling for hookers. This is a MAJOR embarrasment!
There is something to be said for public shame as a punishment. What ever happened to it? They used to use the stocks to punish people. It really didn't hurt you physically - but you stood in the town center all day and got laughed at and publically humiliated for your crimes. We need to weed these sub-human spammers out and publically embarass them and show them that spamming is a despicable practice that will NOT be tolerated!
Duh.... unless the "screenshot" is faked, a point you were obviously too dull to catch on to...
-- Your Servant,
Your Servant, B. Baggins
I don't think this guy was going after these people because they were sending spam. He was doing it because they were using his domain name and he was getting thousands of emails from people pissed off about receiving spam from his domain.
I think that's perfectly understandable.
dp
---
http://insipid.com
Actually, that's not very far fetched. Assuming she does, in fact, have a web-cam, back orifice provides this functionality with a single mouse click.
Oh boy, just what we need: a new way to discourage Spammers. I can see it now.
Spammer's phone rings.
``Hello?"
``Yeah, hi! Is this $SPAMMMER?"
``Why?"
``I got a copy of your spam, the one about the web site that promises ``Real Time Lezbo S&M Action". I gave it to a nerd buddy, who tracked you down. I decided to come on over & see you perform."
``If you come over here, I'm gonna call the police on you."
``I already talked to the chief of police in your town. He's pissed that you sent his child a spam advertising that web site about ``Old MacDonald & His Cow", so he's coming over too. In fact, that's his car sitting in the driveway. If you perform well with Mistress Domme, he's willing to drop the charges. Be sure to ice down the beer!"
Jeez, I'm about to blow all of my karma on this one sick joke.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
Assuming this is true (and he's apparently gotten enough accurate information about these individuals that he's either convinced he's right or willing to risk a libel suit) this is a perfect example of why all spam, no matter how interesting the product or service may be or what company it's from, must be deleted without response.
These people are willing to steal other people's AOL accounts (OK, let's all laugh at the AOL users, but it could have easily been a local/regional ISP) to send their spam, the "pump and dump stock scam" probably damages both the hapless investors and the company in question, all in the name of making money.
I say we mega-Slashdot this site -- send a copy of this URL to everyone you know (_especially_ if they use AOL) and tell them to look at it(*). Point out that just because it's comes from a *koff* "trusted" site like eBay or Microsoft doesn't mean it's any more welcome or desired. Make sure that people start using a company's or site's "opt-out" policies for junk mail.
I don't know at what point spam becomes "unprofitable" but the more people who refuse to cater to spammers or their clients, the better.
Jay (=
(*) Okay, maybe not everyone you know. No point in spamming in the name of anti-spam. But at least tell people about the site.
The part most folks forget when talking about SPAM is that somebody is buying the junk the folks are selling. Like everyone else on the net I look forward to a cascade of crap every time I open my mail program. What amazes me is that somebody is sending these idiot money for their get-rich-quick scheme and their diet drugs. I wonder how many responses are required to make bulk e-mail profitable? I be their bussinesses are on pretty shaky ground and a small reduction in the number of responses could put them out of bussiness. I think the answers might be to educate the 'consumers' of these questionable products against responding. This is the surest way to put a stop to commercial spam. With a little more education, we could erect a tombstone in the dot-com graveyard for bulk e-mail. StinkyDog -Sit, Stinky, sit. Good dog.
âoeWho knew something as harmless as willful ignorance could end up having real consequences?â
Wrong. People do want to be anonymous.
When you walk down a crouded street, you're (for the most part) anonymous. Even if there are cameras on you, they don't know it's you (unless you're being followed). But the net, and especially the web, is different. Cookies and logs make you as trackable and traceable as if you had a homing device and all your vital information was sent without human intervention.
Free speech is one issue and privacy another, but they tie in with being able to being anonymous.
A great quote, "If it can't be abused- it's not a freedom".
- Serge Wroclawski
Ponder this: If he never had been able to crack the machine, you would never had heard of the story.
Look at the vcard: http://elias.rhi.hi.is/premier.cluelessfucks.com/v -cards/Rodona-Garst.vcf Why would "Rodona" put "Spammer For Hire" in her title? It's gotta be a fake.
Bahaw HAW HAW HAW!
Ok, lemme get this straight.....
Chucklehead says she's on a laptop at home.
Screenshot of AOL/1stClassMail:
Did anyone look at the systray on that screenshot??? There's a WINGATE Icon in the systray and the ICQ Netwatcher icon. So, I'm to assume from Ol' boys description that this pc is connected to the internet. I look at the systray and see ICQ isn't connected - if it was and she closed it, the Icon would be gone. If it were disabled, the icon has a red circle with the slash through it. Is there a WINGATE client???? Who, on this planet, with enough guts to be a professional spammer with questionable ethics (even for a spammer), is STUPID enough to use a laptop running WIN98 and WINGATE proxy server?????? ICQ isn't connected to anything. How do you suppose knucklenuts got the screenshots without ANYONE seeing ANYTHING? Hack her - Ok. Hack her and surf - OK. Hack her and get screenshots? C'mon.
Oh..... by the way.....Windows98....
"...escalated my remote access to that of a full privileged local user,..." WHAT? What Penis wrinkle made that up?
If you do what you always did, you get what you always got.
PCAnywhere, Back Orifice (classic & 2000), Windows 2000's Remote Terminal (I forget the "proper" name), Netbus + any screen grabber, and a whole host of other such software.
Yeah, but you have to _install_ all of those first. It's possible, but not very likely, that the spammer had been infected with BO or some such program, but IMNSHO it's far more likely that this is a hoax.
This does look quite like a large piece of sensationalizm. altho, if I had caught a ring of spammers, I would probably sensationalize it as well. Spammers are the dregs of the internet society by any measurement. Even porn kings rate higher. If this is real then much applause is due. and yeah having your account used as the from: line really sucks. I worked for a major university for a while, and if any spam appeared from a domain, the entire university blocked the domain(s). and at some point after receiving a message from the "offender's" domain, the admin would either email from another acount, or call and complain. I think that out of this we should look at the implications of all the admins out there who do not use "due proccess" in deciding to ban domains for "improper email" and instead use the knee jerk reaction of O SH*T lock this out NOW. even if this story is all sensationalizm, the points of proper administration are valid.
$home =~ s/work/play/gi; nice -20 run $home;
I made the list of people whom this company is afraid to spam my old email address of "lordkano@sgi.net" is on the list download the list of people whom they fear from...t m
http://homepages.manawatu.net.nz/~alanjb/misc.h
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
My 'victim' (and this poor dork Rodona Garst) are low-life - nasty, but also pretty stupid. Many of the new generation of Net users simply don't appreciate how the net's resources can be used to collate information about them, how much about themselves they reveal
:-)
Whether this spammer (the "poor dork Rodona Garst") is stupid or not is really irrelevant. By the fact that she is able to use a computer to send spam, con naive AOL users into providing their usernames/passwords, participate in illegal stock schemes, etc, she has demonstrated that she has sufficient mental capability to be considered mentally competent (i.e. not mentally retarded or insane), and as such is responsible for her actions. And as they say, don't play with fire unless you're willing to get burned. This time, she got burned, and I feel no sympathy for her. If she was unwilling to take the risk of her (immoral, and some illegal) actions being exposed, she should not have performed those actions, and *further* should not have framed innocent people for them.
Now, I might be swayed by your argument about stirring up a "lynch mob", had this simply been a case of political disagreement, or someone doing something unpopular/controversial, etc. But the problem here, to me, is that not only did do it, but then framed an innocent individual for her spams. If that individual then comes back and kicks her in the ass, well then c'est la vie. She can deal with it. If she was spamming people without forging her IP (or forging it to be restricted numbers, thus not implicating innocents), then maybe publishing her information would be too extreme. But in this case, I think it is appropriate.
All in all, I think she and her associates got off rather easy. If the story is true, and the Man In The Woods did indeed gain access to the computers of Garst et al., then he could have easily destroyed everything on their disks rather than simply publishing the information about her deeds on the Web. Or perhaps he could have discovered sufficient personal data to cause more personal havoc in her life. Given the hassle that she caused, I think he showed remarkable restraint
I think that this seems a little more plausible (less implausable?) than finding/installing BO.
I have to disagree. Finding BO is no big trick, just go to the web site and download it. It would also be much easier to install/hide from a remote location because of it's smaller size.
that this is a spoof.
This guy claims to be such an important security expert, yet in addition to reading all of the "Hacker books", visiting "Hacker webpages", reading all of the traffic from the "Hacker mailing lists", and earning a living he STILL has time to hack his way across the internet and steal a hundred megabytes of information from these people.
I think that he even throws in the negative comments about AOL users in an attempts to curry favor with people like us.
Rodona, or whoever she is, has some decent nipples but I doubt the veracity of his story.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
For example, if you see:
Received: from Comp1 (max1-31.losangeles.corecomm.net [216.214.106.XXX]) by cfexchange.ccff.ca with SMTP
(Microsoft Exchange Internet Mail Service Version 5.5.2232.9)
id JY36QKNM; Wed, 7 Jun 2000 09:17:35 -0400
To: ghguy@dffhgj.com
You would then do
net view \\216.214.106.XXX.
You might see something like:
Shared resources at \\216.214.106.XXX
Sharename Type Comment
C Disk
EPSON Print
The command was completed successfully.
The real question is, what next? There are a wide range of options available, from the calling of authorities (The ISP in question) all the way down to revenge. Where is the happy medium?
--Mike--
I only see one. Hugely disappointing. I was hoping for a challenge.
Nerd Rock In Progress
That list is probably at least partially a list of posters to news.admin.net-abuse.*.
I never reply to spam. I often followup spam to originating site's postmaster/abuse. I occasionally post to nana*. I'm on the list.
Oh, and to those who say "the whole story of hacking in is impossible!", bite me. People are really that dumb---I've known lusers who
I'm not convinced this story is real, but I'm sure it's not impossible.
-- veni vidi nuclei deceri --- I came, I saw, I dumped core.
Been there, done that. flowers.com (a bakery) was forged in a spam run. They sued the spammer, and won.
James
>Another datapoint: on the site there is a list of "anti-spammers that they won't send spam to".
I took a look at this list. A number of the names are obvious spam-blocks, abuse@*, etc.
And I found my own name. Four times, different variations. Wow, & I haven't complained about spam in years. (Could it be that I'm just a cheap SOB who won't buy anything advertised in email? Naw.)
But I'm saddened that they didn't include my favorite spamblock of all time -- the one where I used ``cyberpromo".
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
It seemed to me to either be a very similar situation, or a fairly blatant rip of the story.
-------
CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Evidently Rodona got to cluelessfucks.com- they took the mirror down.
This is absolutely REAL information. I checked out the list of anti-spammers that he got off her computer, and MY NAME WAS ON THE LIST.
You can see for yourself. pdrap@ctp.com, pdrap@concentric.net and pdrap@cris.com are all on the list. Those addresses are no longer active, but at one time I did a helluva lot of spammer killing with those addresses.
I was skeptical too, but after considering it all night, it makes much more sense that he snagged the info using Back Orifice than the notion that he made it all up. Particularly so since the data appears to be accurate.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
BackOrifice or NetBus-style monitors would give you this kind of info, allow you remote (at least command-line) control of the victim's computer (even at the same time they're using it!), collect screenshots, and conceal themselves from the "usual" methods of determining what's running on their own machine - that's what they were designed to do.
As for WHY he doesn't say how he did it - maybe he's anticipating being able to "get" them again, and doesn't want them cutting off his access?
I agree. The complete lack of any technical information on the hacking seems pretty suspicious. I do know of at least 6 different ways to get into a windoze machine and do this, but all of them take a little time and effort. Given the detailed amount of other info, I'd expect a little bit on the hacking.
There are other incorrect technical details which would point to this poster being more of a user (ex-spammer) rather than a system administrator. The "blank Bcc: line" comment is wrong, because Bcc: is a function of the MUA, once it gets sent to the MTA over SMTP, every one of those addresses is converted to an RFC821 RCPT command.
I got the exact same feeling from this whole affair as you have, an ex-spammer disgruntled he didn't get paid for something. He/She had some time alone with Rodona's laptop, and copied a bunch of stuff onto some floppies or ftp'ed. With a little fixing up to appear as an agrieved sysadmin to throw his ex-employers off the scent.
Spammers and telemarketers are all fair targets for retribution, whether through hacking or social engineering (the sex survey, FBI hotline, others)
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
RADON GAS ROT
ROAD RAT SONG
DRAGON ROAST
ARROGANT SOD
GRAND AS ROOT
SODA GRANTOR
NAG STARR DOO
ORGAN RAT DOS
And my personal favorite: SATAN ROD GOO
Conspiracy theories, anyone?
Don't get too excited... This address (treerat@usa.net) appears on the list... for me it's just a /dev/null account. I've never used it to file abuse complaints... None of my real accounts appears on this list, and I have to tell ya, I've had my fair share of "spammer kills"
As a guess, this is just a run of the mill spam list... If you take a look, some of the addresses are even munged...
Cheers,
TreeRat
---- Proudly marching to the beat of a different kettle of fish.
Oh yeah...that's true. If that spamware she was using would sort out the victim list by mail exchanger and address as few as five to ten victim's e-mail boxes per envelope, those numbers would be achievable. Even on a 56k (33.6 max. upload) dialup those numbers would be achievable. Cool! This still could be a true story!
:(
Again...I really hope it's a true story. It's nice to believe that someone somewhere is using vigilante justice tactics against spammers.
The biggest things I see going for the story are:
1. The provided details! (icq logs, pictures, etc.)
2. The premier.cluelessfucks.com mirror was taken down under threats of lawsuits.
The things against this story being true are mentioned in a zillion other posts, most of which seem to center around the lack of actual hacking details.
If it _is_ true, I wonder if this spam queen is on the phone right now selling the story about how she was victimized by a hacker who tried to destroy her livlihood (and cruelly put pictures of her humungous aerolas all over the internet) to Lifetime...
Doug ---- Co-host of Ghostly Talk
BTW, I host my own domains and email and I monitor spam closely. The problem is getting worse: There's even a spammer operating over the last few days who is mailing to "postmaster@" and that is a huge no-no. They are shameless.
NO, they didn't use his site as a relay, they used it as a FORGED return address.
Read the article.
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
I don't know if it's legal; that's one of those debates that's still up in the air (see here for the last /. article about such). But this seems to be justified at the very least. The crimes he KNEW these people were comitting (to say nothing about what he found out) are sufficient. Now, IANAL, but I don't think what he found is admissable as evidence for prosecution, but it would serve as a great reason for conducting civil and criminal investigations, wouldn't it? Then they can get the same info legitimately, and can the spam for a few years, or hit them in their pockets, where it hurts. :)
but two wrongs don't make a right. ya can't fight fire with fire without being called a pyro. stop fighting the fight yourself and call in the fbi.
- real hackers don't have sigs -
There are mirrors at:
:)
http://elias.rhi.hi.is/premier.cl uelessfucks.com/
http://cow.org/~noise/belps.freewebsi tes.com/
http://homepages.manawatu.net.nz/~alanjb/
There is also some interesting posts at an old mirror here:
http://premier.cluelessfucks.com/ (gotta love that domain name!)
This is great information... where else could you find out how many freckles are on a spammer's ass
------
IanO
------
Objects in Mirror are Losing!
Nice to see I'm not the only one here that thinks this is complete bullshit. He basically said "I'm smart so I was able to hack them and here is a picture of their monitor". As for the stock stuff I saw nothing about stock pumping/dumping schemes or insider info, just someone telling someone else to buy this or that...granted I didn't read it all (the aweful colors scared me away).
Oh ya, since when can you get a picture of someone by hax0ring them?
The original story is dated as the 24 of May. The mirror at http://premier.cluelessfucks.com/ was taken down less than 2 days ago.
It takes a while before there is enough linking to it for the search engine's web crawlers to find. For example Google last grabbed /. on the 4th of April.
Very happy day. I've never been sure if The List Of Very Dangerous Individuals exists....
...not only The List exists, but I'm on it. WAY cool.
I also saw a lot of familiar addresses there... =)
The lack of technical detail, and specifically the references the "screen shots" led me to believe that this story isn't real. As easy as it is to take down a Windows box, it is not easy to gain full remote access except through BackOriface or what not.
I also find it highly unlikely that every single spammer in this group would be completely vunerable to an attack. It's entirely possible that there is some voodoo that I don't know about, but this doesn't look real to me.
In Virginia, we passed a bill last year making Spam a crime wherein the victim is entitled to financial compensation on the order of $10 per Spam up to $25,000 per day for an individual and at least $25,000 per day or $10 per Spam whichever the greater for any violated ISP involved.
:) Even if by this recognition the funds value trickles back to none, it will have served its purpose.
:(
So, why don't we set up an Anti-Spam Legal fund for suing spammers in Virginia? Anyone opting into the fund agrees to let the fund prosecute the case on their behalf and in return all proceeds go back into the fund. Whatever surplus the fund recieves can go into Anti-Spam education, lobbying for Anti-Spam laws in other states / nationally, support for MAPS, ORBS and other Anti-Spam mail blockers, and perhaps some other related Open Source projects or the FSF.
The problem is the legal work would have to start out pro bono as initially revenue into this fund would be quite small as people learn about it and opt in. Also, most Spammers may be difficult to take to court in Virginia though the interstate commerce laws should apply to anyone in the United States at least. OTOH, were it to develop, reputation of the consequences of Spamming in Virginia would become pretty well reputed and make this state even more of a Spam-Free Commonwealth.
And since AOL is located in Virginia, wouldn't any account on their server constitute an Individual Presence in the state of Virginia -- namely the e-mail address -- thus allowing any user to sue any Spammer who spams the supposed cash cow of AOL users...?
Of course, the one other problem with this is that it invites the Pro-Business, Pro-Free Speech at-any-cost Supreme Court to strike the law down...
Time Lord, Dark Horse: The Techno Mage of Gallifrey
If your connected through a LAN, you never see an icon indicating the existence of a net connection. As soon as my company switched from dialup to ISDN we had to get used to the fact that we had no way of knowing if we had an active net connection without launching some program that checked it. (NetMonitor, Netscape, IE, Ping)
Matthew Miller,
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
My brother and I are both in Clarksville, TN reading this! How odd....
Eagleson's Law: Any code of your own that you haven't looked at for six or more months, might as well have been written
With some degree of hesitation I have got to say that it's fake. There aren't enough details about how he did what he did, but there is alot of pomp and circumstance. Plus, those *pictures*! I find it difficult to believe that any human looks that goofy. But then there's Linda Tripp... The documentation of addresses and telephone numbers gives a certain amount of credence, but the technical details were so sketchy that I'm really having a hard time believing this. And the picture with the chat from the "cuosin" and the porn ad in the background was too stereotypical to be believable.
I'm skeptical, is all I'm saying.
- Rev.After reading his recount on hacking into these peoples' computers and deleting their spam program, I honestly don't think he did enough. He should have taken them to court, suing for the damages, and hopefully send their asses to jail for fraud. If enough of these people get caught and something DONE to them, it will be a deterrant for when other people are thinking of spamming. These people just think they'll make money, and think that they won't go to jail.
I do like all the pictures and home addresses of the spammers. I hope they know that everyone knows who they are! hahahaha
Or has this been thought of before? :/
Later...
KangarooBox - We make IT simple!
I SOOO want this to be true, and even if it isn't it's a great read. Spammers are evil and must be stopped.
I'd pay $$$ to "see a movie" about a task force, funded by disgruntled ISPs, that does this exact sort of thing, tracking down spammers and cracking their systems...
The frustrated writer begins to ponder a novel......
Matthew Miller,
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Why did she use his email address to begin with?
After he deleted her email account, why did she use his details again?
surely it won't be hard for Rodona to track him down.
Does any one reconize the spam which is listed on the site?
If so what was the repy-to email address
Just wondering........
I'm no hacker but I do know enough. How the heck did he ever get a screen shot of the 'hacked' machine. Perhpase I'm missing something.... but to get such a shot you'll need some kind of Third party software installed that moddifies the Win95/98 Kernal. Theres no feasible way to do so without rebooting the machine, and pushing a fair ammount of information down the pipe. How could have possibly done so during one session without the end user taking notice?
Please prove me wrong in my assumtions.
There is a difference. You can't compare UCE to MP3s. When I download a MP3 anonymously, I'm asking for the file. I don't ask for unsolicited email!
Then again maybe he is really mad at freewebsites and is looking to DoS them through the slashdot effect. Hmmm....
No, we want anonimity. Maybe you could start by backing up your assertion that wanting anonimity = insanity, possibly the most head-in-the-sand statement I can think of in today's global political situation (think China).
.02
My
Quux26
My
Quux26
www.crashspace.net
Im sorry, but this sounds like John Markoff wrote this. I really don't believe it. Also, This is not the first time a domain controller sued a Spammer, Matt Seidl from localhost.com sued a spammer for using his domain name in their spam. Which I hate to say, was thrown out.
Objects in the blog are closer then they ap
If this is real, and it certainly *could* be.. two things come to mind.
1) We are brought up to think two wrongs don't make a right. What the person did here is most likely very illegal. It doesn't matter what caused it. It's illegal. (which makes me wonder if he really did it)
2) Screw what we are brought up to think. The net is different things to those of us in the know. The boundaries are different, the rules are different, and what we thing the 'net' really is is more refined and accurate. So.. how can those who don't know make laws against it?
See those messages encouraging mass spamming in order to get stock volumes up? That's pump 'n dump. A credible public company on the market does *NOT* need to behave like this, PERIOD. There is *NO* reason to do this.
Smallcap (penny) stocks that are basically scams (those with many shares are 'pumping' the stock by all this spam, hence creating volume, and an increase in price, and an increase in demand for the stock, and then dumping what they own for moremoney.)
That is not what stock is about, and it's illegal.
There does seem to be too much hype and too few details to the story. A questionable point in my mind: Just how does one track a user to an IP address based on email? Unless you control the originating SMTP server (hence you could cull the logs), it must be very difficult to resolve a user down to an IP... in this story, the return domain was forged but the originating SMTP was stolen from an unrelated service, so how is the spammer IP address resolved?
Of course. I wouldn't put my main e-mail address on a webpage like that, much the same way I don't put my main e-mail address up on Slashdot. Web-based e-mail is wonderfully anonymous (when you kill all browser cookies), and since you only end up downloading the message from the server if you click to open it, you don't waste an hour waiting for a day's worth of spam to be fed down the pipe from your POP3/SMTP mail server. That was probably the easiest option available to him.
Given that the subject matter was illegal and it's not impossible for Hotmail or Yahoo or others to trace IP addresses, my next tactic would be to use an cyber cafe or some other similar place to create the e-mail address. Probably, I'd upload the webpage to the server from another cyber cafe to assure greater anonymity, just in case they're logging IP addresses, too.
Further, it's easy enough to write a Javascript that breaks your e-mail address into two pieces so that webspiders don't find it and spam it, and yet when a user clicks on the link, it gives you the correct and complete address. I'd pass you the script you can add to your own websites to do this but I don't have it handy right now. It's common enough knowledge, I didn't write it.
Subj: Your an idiot. (Score:0)Hmmm. Generally, if you wish to insult someone effectively, it's better to have a thorough and proper command of the language you are using.
Pursuant to the above paragraph, you will note this convention, used every day in common English:
"your" = possessive. ie. "It's your brain that doesn't work."
"you're" = contraction of "you are". ie. "You are about as intelligent as a tsetse fly."
To combine the two into an impressive demonstration of your new-found (though, ironically, remedial) English skills, you could use a sentence like the following:
"It's not your fault that you're not very intelligent."
Along those same lines, you should be aware of tricky words like "there", "they're" and "their". And "its" vs. "it's" never ceases to confound.
Since I suspect English is your first language, I would expect you to demonstrate a more thorough command of the language than was demonstrated in your post. One's second and third languages are generally expected to display grammatical and contextual errors; but I would doubt you have either the tenacity or the requisite breeding required to learn a second language. I have nothing but respect for those who learn several languages, since it's not an easy process. (I know, I speak several fluently.)
I hope that you get to use this tidbit of information to avoid being marked down on your high school freshman English tests.
Now, isn't there a nice and warm Sony Playstation waiting somewhere for you? Or maybe you prefer a little Jerry Springer?
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Doesn't mean it's offline... though it may.
The computer sitting next to me was moved from dialup to DSL... and as long as the modem is donw, icq netdetect still thinks the machine is 'offline' (even though ethernet link is up)
Shut up you bloody vikings...
Sorry, to this day whenever I hear the word spam - I think of Monty Python.
BlackNova Traders
What sort of cruel parents would name their kid "Rodona"? And that face, eeeuuuooow. . .
The kind of anonymity that Napster users do is the home version of intellectual property theft, with copyright violation (artists songs are their work, right?) and so on thrown in.
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
"I also downloaded enough information from other data files to determine who I was dealing with. Despite my dislike for spammers, I left the laptop otherwise un-harmed"
now... how would this person know it's a laptop? he can't. Even if he did go into the power management and saw it was set to notebook/laptop/whatever, you can't be sure. But why would he do that anyway? heh...
2nd: he says "laptop." anyone with as much knowledge as he claims to have would know laptops are ancient, and would be calling them notebooks. (does anyone think dead tree when they here "notebook" nowadays?..)
-DrkShadow
I tend to think it is someone they know also. As much as I like to think it was a BO attack, there is another perfectly acceptable hack... gaining physical access to the machine!
Notice that the author only shows ICQ stuff from a few machines. That ain't a lot. In fact, two of the machines were prolly sitting next to one another. Simply email/ftp all the icq message files/.jpegs/.txt files and ya got lots of ammo. Getting near three machines is pretty easy. Hell, look at how Kevin got all his passwords - he just called people on the phone and said "what is your password?" They gave it to him.
However the site author did it, it is pretty damned wicked.
Well, the WHOIS info he lists for PREMIERSERVICES.COM is accurate. Check out http://www.networksolutions.com/cgi-bin/whois/whoi s?STRING=PREMIERSERVICES.COM&S TRING=Search
Matthew Miller,
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Okay - here's the deal. BO and BO2K are both programs that must execute on the target system. You don't "hack into" a machine and execute it remotely. There's generally no command shell available that will allow you to kickoff a program like that. Instead it's generally easier to send them an executable that has BOwhatever wrapped in it. When they exeucte this program is loads itself up, sets some Reg keys, and opens a port for business.
:-)
:-)
If this person is claiming to simply have knocked on the door of this machine and gotten a screenshot s\he is full of it. On the other hand it's possible these morons had already had someone send them a copy of BOwhatever and that they had a port open and waiting. IF that was done then yes it wopuld've been CAKE to take a screenshot.
Goes like this - find the correct port - 31337 for BO for instance, log in - usually no password, screenshot the system saving it to a file somewhere (there's a command for this), then fire up a WEB server on their side (BO can do this easily), browse to the correct file location, download the screenshot. If you're smart you'll "freeze" the file for transfer (compress it) and then "melt" it on your side. If you don't do this the transfer of the data can become a bit noticable - I once almost got spotted when someone's little CUCME conference was lagging due to this - they were having CyberSex of all things (shiver). Figures I got the woman's side of it too - that means I saw the guy on her screen (ick).
So - the only way this could've been done quite as it was described (or as quickly as it was described) was for BO to already have been present. Considering that I used to find BO on as many as a hundred machines a night on my ISP alone (I used to warn people) this isn't exactly incredible but... Just imagine the infected sorts of files people must send to SPAMMers! If you read the ICQ logs you can also see that we're not exactly talking about rocket scientists either
My question is this - if this is a haox, why? An axe to grind on this company? That's an awful lot of work creating those logs ya' know, the conversations are mostly lucid... But then, who the heck saves all of those silly ICQ conversations? Talk about leaving evidence around for whoever busts down the door!
I dunno' if I believe this or not.... Sorry to ramble
P.S. There used to be whole archives of screenshots done with BO. My favorite was of a desktop where the message read somerthing like "get off the computer dork, there's a perfectly nice girl on the bed behind you - go get it on with her" - the second shot, taken through the system's camera (yes it does this) was of the guy's face! Talk about a laugh riot - his jaw was on the floor!
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
I live in Lake Forest, about 2 miles from Mission Viejo, CA. On this page: http://belps.freewebsites.com/PS-Employers/orderfo rm.htm It says a company in Mission Viejo sent in an order to these people. I think I'll drop by tomorrow to see if I can confirm/deny if any of this is true or not. Patrick
Seriously, though, Cyber Promotions has been dead for years. Sanford says he's anti-spam now, but his actions don't reflect this.
Don't confuse your ignorance with technical impossibility. BackOriface is similar to pcAnywhere or Microsoft's SMS, all of which give you remote GUI access to a Windows box. Want even more? According to the Back Oriface feature list BO2k supports Multimedia support for audio/video capture, and audio playback.
Note that BO is pretty easy to install. A shared drive with no password or a weak one or a trojan horse email or website (ActiveX can work for you!) would all allow you to break into a clean Windows box. One with dozens of insecure programs installed (e.g. ICQ, some IRC clients, some email clients, etc.) would be even easier.
__
Man, this should be a Wired article. This is just too good.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
The part most folks forget when talking about SPAM is that somebody is buying the junk the folks are selling.
Not necessarily. If spamming really did work, how long do you think it would be before all the big producers of mainstream consumer crap picked up on it?
I'm sure that most spam runs have some rate of positive response, but it's abysmally small. It's the job of spammers to convince their potential clients otherwise. They rely on new, uninformed, and clueless folk who want to make it big by selling in CyberSpace (tm).
Rule 1: Spammers lie.
Lemmings are silly; dinosaurs are extinct.
How did he obtain all the photos? Do these ppl store their semierotic photos on their hard drives?
And these stories at the and i didnt really have time to read...
strange indeed
Maybe he simply got put down by these women and now simply tries to blame them in public.
I read the whole site and looked at every picture and am confident that this is punitive action taken by someone close to Rodona. Here is how I came to my conclusion:
1. If this guy is such a professional, he would have included some valid contact information on the site. You would think that a professional would want to use something like this to promote himself.
2. There are banner ads on the site. This guy knew that it would be a hot topic and prepared with the requisite revenue generating banner ads. This is not the mark of a professional. I could understand if this were part of a larger site, and the banner ads were simply blanketed on all pages.
3. The pictures are too darn detailed. What reason would she have for keeping those on her own personal computer (which is where the "security expert" claims to have gotten them from). I don't know about you, but my first reaction to "driver's license photos" is to get rid of them.
4. The pictures were augmented with comments. A professional would not do this. Augmenting the pictures shows anger towards her. In a legitimate sense, this could be anger directed at a spammer, but it is an amatureish thing to do. This lends credibilty to the fact that she is an ex-something-or-another.
5. The risque stories are a bit odd. There is no context included with them and they appear to have simply been cut and pasted. Rodona's name isn't on the pages anywhere, nor are any e-mail headers, file names or other identifying marks on them that would indicate that they were part of Premier's product offering. Bottom line, they simply don't fit.
6. The "Email Me" link at the bottom of the page kinda gives it all away IMHO. Click it and you'll see what I mean...
So who do I think did it? There is a ring on her left finger in a few of the pictures so the obvious choice would be a bitter ex-husband. There is also a piece of someone in the background on the "freckled butt" picture. My guess is that he bears an amazing resemblence to the guy who created the website.
It is also obvious that this woman has children. I'm guessing there's probably a pretty nasty custody battle going on. I'm sure this isn't pleasant for her and her children. Imagine one of her kids picking up the phone and hearing a stream of vitrioloc filth from some ignoramus who thinks they're doing us all a favor.
Ok so maybe Rodona is being a B***CH about the divorce and her ex isn't exactly mature enough to handle it well. It probably explains why they are getting divorced in the first place. Please leave her alone. She's probably embarassed and stressed out enough as it is. Good luck Rodona. E-mail me if you want help (just reverse the address above)...
-Chuck
--
Quantum Linux Laboratories - Accelerating Business with Linux
* Education
* Integration
* Support
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
Maybe it *is* faked -- maybe not, but if it isn't you have to *love* the idea of snagging nudies off of a hard disk and posting them on the internet.
It's kind of like the old punishment idea of public humiliation. I'd imagine that all the flabby-ass Rodona's out there would think twice if they knew that if caught spamming their flabby butts and ugly boobs would be on the internet..
IIRC, some of the well-known remote administration tools like BO2K or NetBus (or something else, I haven't tried them yet) offer the possibility to take screenshots of the remote desktop.
Having said that, I don't think the story is true - too little actual information and too pictures of ugly peple for my taste...:)
Cthulhu fhtagn!
Interesting. You say:
>
Why? Well:
>
If I correctly assume (and please disabuse me of the notion that your specific example isn't meant to be applied generally if that's the case) that you're saying "People who want to be anonymous just want to escape accountability," then I have to ask "Why not?"
There are plenty of times when escaping accountability is a very, very good thing. Some of those rabble-rousing pamphleteers who helped rile up those New World colonists into a revolutionary frenzy certainly had a good reason to want to escape responsibility. If you were some oppressed peasant getting beaten senseless because of trumped-up charges brought against you by the local mullah and you had some pictures of said mullah engaging in a sexual act with an animal or child not his wife, wouldn't it be just spiffy if you could post those pics to the net in complete anonymity?
In both cases, and a few thousand more that a little imagination could dream up, the reason total anonymity would be a good thing is not because, in general, escaping responsibility is a good thing. Anonymity in these cases is good because the price you pay for accepting responsibility can and often is set by people or institutions that are flat-out evil.
If you live in a place or time where the people who have power to punish you will use that power to hurt you for simply exercising the natural rights that all humans should have, then total anonymity can be a darn valuable thing. Where folks disagree these days is on whether we live in a world that meets that description.
That decision is up to you. Personally, I think that even if you believe that the political powers in your jurisdiction are moral, just, and competent, I'd still advise you keep the option of being anonymous just in case things go south in the future. Who knows what the world will look like in 20 years? I don't. I want the option.
Better yet, I wish total anonymity was the default.
I got the fax.com thing too. It is absolutely illegal, and violates several VERY SPECIFIC codes. My copy of their spam got thrown out- maybe I'll get another. Do you know of anybody who's fighting them? I want to nail the buggers.
You know something. I find it very disgusting how so many people who advocate an anonymous internet when it comes to file sharing on Napster, and so forth, but the MINUTE they get spammed, they are all shouting about accountability and how we need better records of who is using the internt.
People, the internet is both accountable and anonymous. Basically, if you want to be anonymous, it's not that difficult to do so. And, if you want to be accountable, you can do that too. The point is, spammers will always fake headers in some way, and "illegal" mp3s will always move anonymously through non-logging proxies, and people will continue to put up webpages showing off their new Corvette, including exactly where it's parked at night, and where in the garage the keys are stored.
The only combat we have against Spammers, is the capitalist approach. Spammers would not be in business, if not for all of the nullheaded PR people who feel they need to mass-market the internet cheaply. And there is nothing expensive about loading up a bulk email program and sending mail to a half-million people.
At my company, we urge our marketing department to stay away from companies who want to send out spam on our behalf. And we've batted 1000 so far (thank god). I feel that we're doing our part by not supporting companies whose only product is unsolicited email. So if you ask me about the "big picture" of stopping SPAM, my answer is simply, stop paying them to do it.
How long till Slashdot gets a Cease and Desist letter because there are links to a certain females private parts?
And, as much as I like seeing "Mess with Spammer" articles, I really wish somebody on the Slashdot staff would attempt to do a little verification on this story before some less reputable person does so.
And, I wonder just how long it will be before that picture (you know which one) get's posted up on Usenet (Alt.binaries.you_know_where) as an advertisement for something lewd...
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
It seems to me that he would have to use something like BO (Which she would have to install) in order to get it.
You've obviously never been to Clarksville. My grandparents have lived there ever since before my mom was born - they were both born there too. It's not, shall we say, at the pinnacle of the technology forefront.
Don't get me wrong. I love the town and will miss it once I have no reason to go there (after all my grandparents and their immediate families pass on), but ain't too much happenin' 'bout an hour north of Nashville near the KY border.
I would tend to agree with the consensus that although it's a cool story, it is probably not true. I would just think that if that many AOL usernames were snagged, we would have heard about somewhere else. Anyone have any more info?
This is supposed to be great art. So why does it look like a bunch of decapitated naked people? -- Calvin
Unfortunately spamcop has a nasty habit of sending complaints to the wrong people. I've been on the recipient end of that and I don't appreciate it.
These people need to get a serious kick in the pants.
Spam pisses me off more than just about any other form of junk-advertising. I will take the commercials on TV and radio, I will ignore banners on web sites and display ads in newspapers, I even have fun harassing telemarketers, but SPAM pisses me off for some reason.
The Digital Sorceress
But, if we're lucky, we can start a whole new thread about geography! Everyone from a town that is so small/backwards that they think they are the lone /.'er there, please respond!
at least one of her machines was NT. It was in some of the icq logs.
well... there's more to it.. http://cow.org/~noise/belps .freewebsites.com/joejob.html someone in salt lake city took it upon themselves to try to pin the "man in the wilderness" id on ravi pina who owns cow.org. why? revenge, etc, we don't know. we do know that ravi certainly didn't do the hack, and several of the things the poster mentioned just dont ring true -- as steve sobol so eloquently points out. the existance of the joe job really does alot to harm any possible credibility that rodona may have had -- it will, hopefully, result in the termination of two throw away dialups and may implicate another member of the premier services cadre. rule: spammers are dumb. so there you have it.. i really dont think its fake now.
If you had committed a crime by hacking into someone else's hard drive and then posted it all on the internet, would you not care about these things? 1) getting arrested? 2) becoming the target of revenge by the spammers? At the same time, wouldn't that desire for revenge cause you to do the following? 1) exaggerate events and/or even make up a few more just to fuck with the jerks? 2) leave out certain incriminating details that would add 20 years to your prison time if you're ever caught? 3) add some mis-information so the spammers will be mis-directed should they try to get revenge on YOU? 4) implicated "other" enemies or people you hate just for fun? Now let's see what kind of loopholes can exist! Suppose these facts: You are the original spammer. You purposely leave trails of bread crumbs to entice would-be vigilantes. You "conveniently" place in your hard drive some photos of your (you, the spammer) enemies' photos. You also place other fake incriminating evidence. Then you just let nature take place and allow your honey pot to be broken into... With these thoughts in mind, go and re-read the web site articles...
Just reading the first page causes me to shudder at the way it's written.. Take this quote, for example:
... Finally on the fourth day my digital pager went off. The message on the LCD read; "Spammer is on-line!"
By carefully examining the email headers and message body of previously sent spams I was able to identify a unique signature that appeared in every email the spammer sent. I designed an email filter to detect this signature, and placed it on the mail gateway of a high volume Internet mail server
The above just makes me laugh, if you ignore the question of, "how'd you get that filter program on the 'high volume internet mail server'?" Did you use your h4x0ring sk1llz, or was it your own for your business of providing advanced TCP/IP know-how?
Once I had escalated my remote access to that of a full privileged local user
We're talking windows 95 here.. At least judging from the screenshots. EVERY user is fully privileged.
There was only one way to find out how many of them were forging my domain. I was going to have to hack them all!
I love that quote. It sounds like it came straight out of "Hackers."
Regardless of whether or not it's fake, it's entertaining in two ways -- once as a fantasy tale of someone taking revenge on spammers, and once as a badly written overly dramatic technical article from an advanced TCP/IP know-how provider who can use advanced tools like NSLOOKUP and WHOIS...
--- Where's my X.400 protocol decoder?
Of course, since he apparently got in right away after she sent the spam, he would have had to do it without rebooting her computer.
Perhaps he replaced one of the standard Windows EXEs with BO?
PCanywhere is probably a better bet.
Not to mention a file of 200,000 addresses of "confirmed anti spammers" that should never be mailed. Since I found my own address on that list, I have reason to believe that they weren't just randomly generated.
I tend to like the disgruntled ex-boyfriend theory. The T&A photos are part of it. Would Rodona keep scanned GIFs of her own cheesecake pictures on her disk? Possibly, but unlikely. However, she or her boyfriend would certainly have the developed pictures sitting around. That's why someone with intimate access seems more believable.
But for all that, I didn't find the "hacking" story all that implausible, details or no details.
I showed the article to my boss and he told me to print up the contact information the guy stole. He wants to start doing business with them. *SIGH* I reminded him we'd set up our own SMTP server for sending SPAM and were just waiting for him to write the copy.
What he doesn't know is Spamming every possible e-mail address @aol.com will result in AOL blocking the IP ASAP, so while j1234567890@aol.com is still getting his spam, AOL will be making sure our IP NEVER spams AOL again.... (HE HE)
then he'll hire somebody to do it, but the guilt won't be mine!!!
Matthew Miller,
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
This would seem to be ficticious. Nicely written, and completely what everyone would *love* to do to spammers. However, given the language used and the style of writing I would make a pretty good stab at saying that it was written by someone that has only a passing knowledge of security systems. Anyone who had actually done what he claimed to have done would certainly have described things a little more accurately... "....and hacked my way in to the spammer?s computer. The following screen-shot is a picture of the spammer?s Windows desktop caught in the act of forging my domain. 1st Class Mail is a bulk email program. It is used for spamming the Internet. It has no other purpose. Once I had escalated my remote access to that of a full privileged local user..." This kind of sets my teeth on edge... "...I also downloaded enough information from other data files" Reads like pseudo-technology in a cheap film... I'm not saying the parties involed don't exist. What I a saying that this is wish fulfillment....
The secret of success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake those, you've got it made. (Marx)
probably either staged, or a disgruntled employee. Probably the latter, actually, because addresses check out on some of those leads described in the emails. I don't think those folks would willingly give out salary, employer, phone numbers, etc., without compensation.
This is highly tricked up, otherwise it wouldnt be such a good story. The screen shot was prolly done by any number of remote admin tools, take your pic BO or a variant, PC Anywhere, etc. I mean, this lady can not be too bright, she is a AOLer that runs a spam business.
I would say there is a bit of online social engineering going on. Now, had it been me that had done this, I would have used HER email address, emailed all her clients, and either had them redirect their payments to a swiss account, or I would completely piss them off to the point they take their business elsewhere. Financial ruin is a good end to spammers.
Theres alot of different directions you could take this, if you had the resources he had aquired. Just remember, while as just and as neat as this looks, it could just yet another work of fiction, or yet another "urban myth"
Network penetration is network engineering, in reverse.
I'd be interested in donating to this, if someone will take lead. Now, we just have to figure out how to market it...
Law is whatever is boldly asserted and plausibly maintained. -- Aaron Burr
This was a long time ago, and I don't feel good about it now. I don't know what happened to the guy, but given what he appeared to be up to he might easily have been disciplined or even sacked. In some senses he deserved it, but...
My 'victim' (and this poor dork Rodona Garst) are low-life - nasty, but also pretty stupid. Many of the new generation of Net users simply don't appreciate how the net's resources can be used to collate information about them, how much about themselves they reveal.
There may be many people in Clarkesville, TN reading this story now - /. is widely read, and, significantly, is widely read by journalists who may take up the story. By publishing personal details about them we risk stirring up something like a lynch mob - not necessarily in this case, but the potential is there.
Don't get me wrong - I dislike spammers and scammers and borderline criminal sleazoids as much as anyone, and there's no doubt that this Rodona is a sleazoid. The issue is the power of the medium which is being used against her. Yes, sure, it's the same medium that she has been using against others; but it is also a very powerful medium.
It is, I think, appropriate to make evidence of this sort about this sort of people available to their local police office if you think a crime is being committed (as appears to be the case here); but given that sleazoid lowlife are often not the best balanced of people psychologically, we may be whipping up a storm of hatemail and hate phone calls which may cause harm out of proportion to the crime.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Hello. What he describes is still a problem that goes down to improper relaying.
Steven
Stopping or greatly reducing spam isn't all that difficult.
Works quite well but you have to occasionally post to newsgroups etc to keep the account in the various spammers lists. I put it in a couple of .signatures.
You can protect your whole organisation this way. The theory is that the only people who would ever send mail to the spamprobe account are the spammers. You make it clear on the web site and news posts that the address is a spamtrap account.
It's worth using an alias which will sort alphabetically to somewhere near the beginning of a spammers list. Some of them seem to sort the addresses they send to.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
BTW I'm still wondering how that person got the spammer's screenshot. I doubt that woman had enough rocks for brains to even know of pcA or VNC and he'd have to get past AOL's proxies. Am I missing something here?
Sanity.html - Error 404 not found
If it is fake, then he's stupid for using valid names/addresses:Rodona Garst and Varnjeet Khalsa. I'm going on the assumption that he doesn't want a libel lawsuit, and so it's at least mostly true.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
I was woken up early one morning when the G.M of my company rang me to ask if I was connected to and using PC anywhere on his workstation. ;-)
A Cracker had got in and the G.M actually watched the bugger use his PC
He started up a chat session but the guy ran like his arse was on fire.
He/She did a good job of covering their back, I could not find out who or where he/she was from.
The budget for network security was raised significantly after that
Of course, if he had fully explained everything he had done, everyone on this forum would be slamming him for publicizing how to break in and providing a road map to 31337 script kiddiez to do this kind of thing to naive people across the country and around the world. So either he's faking it if he gives too little information, or he's being a menace if he gives too much. Sorry, you've just squeezed the ratchet of logic a bit too far there. If you want information and detail, look at the two *years* worth of ICQ logs he provided. Who in their right mind would fake up something like that?
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
The SPAM samples are real. I have many of them in my archives (I archive all SPAM I receive so it can be used as evidence).
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
Okay. Seriosuly. This has got to be the biggest load of BS I've yet to read that could somehow pass as "news."
...BS...BS...
Why am I so sure? Hacking a Windows box isn't like hacking a *NIX box. There's no magical login remote control console. These people would have to install insecure 3rd party software just to open the door to an attack that involves anything other than DOS attacks. And don't give me the "BackOrifice" or PCAnywhere bit. Both of these would have to be installed just like any other software|virus|trojan.
If these people were all running some form of *nix this would be an entirely different story. But at least he did a more or less good job of that; it is a pretty good story.
And lets look for a second at the varying degrees of intelligence these people have. They are intelligent enough to not use their own domain, intelligent enough to steal passwords from AOL users (addmittedly not hard) but then too stupid to realize that someone has been messing around on their box? Get real. "Gee, I installed that spam software yesterday, now where did it go?"
BS...BS...BS...BS... (The BS alarm)
--
"A mind is a horrible thing to waste. But a mime...
It feels wonderful wasting those fsckers."
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
Found this link:
o na-Server-and-Dave-Gosse.txt
http://www.prcorp.com/garst.htm
on this page:
http://belps.freewebsites.com/icq-chat-logs/Rod
If this story is faked, he had to create this page (this first link at prcorp.com), too. Read the Rodona (Kim) Garst bio there, she's made a lot of money at spamming according to it.
Michael
Do you have ESP?
I've used this tool myself and obtained screenshots. It's silly easy to use too.
.02
My
Quux26
My
Quux26
www.crashspace.net
The USGS data for Cobblestone Lane in Clarksville doesn't have addresses with it, so mapping software cannot bring up the address.
Do you have ESP?
Of course, there are a number of ways he could have gotten a trojan onto her system. (Determining an IP address would be as simple as creating a little Java applet that "calls home" and get her to visit its Web page.) She seems quite gullible.
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
After having read this article and the posts regarding it I was troubled. What are we to do? Spam is a global problem that does not seem to have a solution. There is no single agency policing spam although measures are being taken to help curb it. Hotmail is prosecuting 8 spammers for forging email headers and Yahoo's policy is to prosecute as well.
./ community knows how to track a spammer, or at least begin to collect data on them. There are tools of the trade that we are able to use to personally identify a spammer or a compromised box and report it to the authorities. Should a compromised box be shut down? Absolutely, in my opinion. It is the admin's responsiblity to ensure security. If they cannot do that properly, shut off the account. (Maybe this will lead to a heightened respect for the admin field.) :)
The better part of the
What do we do?
I don't know about you, but I've decided to get involved. I'm tracking them. I'm legally collecting as much data as possible and turning the spammers in to the appropriate authorities. I'm not hacking or cracking, I'm using standard tools (tracroute, whois, host, etc).
Are you willing to get involved?
I maintain a web site and have database capabilities. If there is any interest in forming a community of professionals to combat spam I would be willing to use my available server space and bandwidth for that. If you're interested, let me know on my home page message board or by simply emailing me.
If you are not willing to get involved (I know how time contraints are) feel free to drop by and see if we are making any progress.
-= Why can't I add 'Anonymous Coward' to my list of Foes? =-
Under the assumption that this is legit, why such a lame response?
So you post a few embarrassing pictures? Not fun, but hardly armageddon.
"Man in the Wilderness" claims to be some hacking superstud. How about
modifying her mail set-up so it includes her name, address, email address,
home phone number and IP address on every outgoing message.
Then let those laws against spamming kick in...
Rob Leduc
I'm not a real systems administrator -- I just play one at home.
Yup.
I had hoped otherwise but the proof is in the actions.
Talk talk talk talk talk about it.
Beat it into the ground, that's the way to do it.
But don't bother acting or doing.
Just talk.
...I've not had a single person contact me...
big surprise.
why must I be right in my assumption of worldwide apathy?
-= Why can't I add 'Anonymous Coward' to my list of Foes? =-
My guess is, the people running that domain are putting the site up to discourage others from trying to take them out or something. Or maybe to garner sympathy for their cause...
-- Braeus Sabaco
Member of the Roman Legion
Customer/worker at Phenomenal Internet Solutions
This is SO educational! -- Kintaro Oe
The network setup is described in the page. Basically, they had some type of dedicated fast connection (T1?) and had that hooked into the LAN. They then had shares set up on the machines....the shares were things like the C:\ drive of the machine....with no passwords. That's the way win95 can work. You can share your resources to everyone. The "hacker" at this point places Back Orifice or some such in the c:\windows\system folder, edits win.ini to include the line "run=backorifice.exe" (or whatever he called it) and waits patiently for the victim to reboot (about a day?). Once she has rebooted, he can snag screenshots and control the machine...plus he still has access to her C: drive. He mentions that the victim only used dialups for spamming (and not the high speed connection) to cover her tracks. No having to mow through AOL proxies....her LAN was connected 24/7 with win9x weak ass security model.
All that I can see in "Man in the Wilderness'" claims are a few addresses and phone numbers that anyone could come up with using WHOIS and one of the gazillion phone directory web sites. His claim of capturing a screen shot of the spammer's computer is just outrageous...Windows may be full of networking holes, but c'mon...
I don't doubt that he was spammed...and I don't doubt that he was spammed by the spammers that he's claiming to have cracked. But I think that almost everything on that web site is made up.
Sure, he probably feels good that he could associate some names to the pages that he posted, but the text reads like a really bad detective story.
Maybe I'm wrong, but looking at the story with an impassioned eye sure makes it look like some guy with an ego and an axe to grind needs to take a creative writing class.
-h-
If you have file access to win, it shouldn't bee to hard to get a screenshot:
-install grabbersoftware
-write some scripting
-change the shortcut for her favorite spamprogramme
how you get fileaccess to a box is a different story...
nosig today
Hey! What have those lions ever done to you to deserve such a hideous fate???
James
And I quote: "At that moment I silently came across the Internet from thousands of miles away.." Its a damn good he wasn't noisy, otherwise he could have scared them off.
This is so fake. He got pictures of her TITS?!?!? I don't believe this for a second.
I think I'm going to puke now.
I covered this in another reply, but feel this bears mentioning again because you UNIX kids don't take the time to consider what a weak security model like win9x offers. The victim was sharing her entire C: drive over a LAN that was connected to a high speed link of some type (read the story, don't just stare at the middle-aged pr0n). With this share wide open, the "hacker" can place the trojan .exe anywhere on the victim machine, then simply tell the machine to run the trojan on the next boot by placing the command "run=c:\pathtoexe\trojan.exe" in the c:\windows\win.ini file.
This is part of the problem: a lot of people think that win9x has some security. It was never meant to.
This thing reads like a Reader's Digest Book Excerpt:
"By carefully examining the email headers and message body of previously sent spams I was able to identify a unique signature..."
"I silently came across the Internet from thousands of miles away..."
"...spread like a silent wildfire through Rodona's computer network..."
This article is clearly aimed at novices who are afraid of getting their AOL passwords and credit card numbers stolen.
The whois and nslookup transcripts appear to have the sole purpose if impressing us with his net-savvy.
At the end: "Let's Get Brutal!" Please. "After much soul searching..." he decides to post Rodona's cheesy erotic stories and a picture of half her ass. But he has no trouble publishing her home address and telephone number, which is much more damaging.
Tracking down and stopping spammers like this is good, but this level of self-congratulation is far beyond the call of duty.
Yea, I agree. What about the ICQ logs? There are way too many and they are way too long to fake, and they all contain spammerish type conversations. Think it's real.
-capt.
A qoute from http://elias.rhi.hi.is/premier.cluelessfucks.com/T heStory.htm "At that moment I silently came across the Internet from thousands of miles away, and hacked my way in to the spammer's computer. The following screen-shot is a picture of the spammer's Windows desktop caught in the act of forging my domain. " http://elias.rhi.hi.is/premier.cluelessfucks.com/p ictures/Rodona-Garst-in-Action.jpg Now comes the weird thing, look at the bottem right of the desktop in the systemtray, icq netdetect if offline, that means there is no internet connection, how the hell did he make that screenshot ?????
Anyway, even if they were spammers, that doesn't mean that the whole story isn't BS anyway...Anyone have ANY verification of this stuff?
-- Braeus Sabaco
Member of the Roman Legion
Customer/worker at Phenomenal Internet Solutions
This is SO educational! -- Kintaro Oe
... but it's entirely possible. Ever heard of Back Orifice? There you go. It will allow you to take nice screenshots.
That's my theory. There's a strange mix of truth/technical vagueness that makes some of the hacking implausible but the reality of the company irrefutable. Now - do these folks actually spam? Who knows. But the phone numbers are certainly valid. Most of the names are probably real, so who knows?
So I'm gonna say that this is some ex-employee who pulled a bunch of stuff off of his co-workers' drives before bailing. All in all, a pretty admirable example of workplace sabotage. Bob Black would be proud.
-carl
. We've got computers, we're tapping phone lines, you know that ain't allowed - Talking Heads, "Life During Wartime"
What's so hard to believe?
1. He never says the name of his employer because he doesn't want to get fired and get them sued. Probably did a lot of this on company time.
2. No contact info for someone who maliciously cracks into a machine? Imagine my surprise.
3. He didn't convince them to trojan the machine. They shared their C: drives to anyone on their LAN. Anyone. No authentication. And the LAN was connected to a high speed link. So he placed the trojan and the command to install it himself(either thru win.ini or some registry merge).
4. Why "hack" an entire site into existance? Let some free server handle the load. It's anonymous and free. Plus, the guy probably (hell, most likely) doesn't have the skill to hack a site into creation.
My guess is that people suffer from some form of envy for his simple prank, and have deemed it "impossible" based on their jealousy.
hmmm...taking a screenshot of the desktop isn't that hard. You can even do it in VB . And yes, you can do it under Win95/98 (not sure about NT...don't have much experience with it).
A genius writes code an idiot can understand, while an idiot writes code the compiler can't understand.
He got the screenshot of the dial-up IP. The screenshot was gotten right in the act when his pager went off, so he didn't wait for a reboot or go through the LAN.
As for the sharing of their C drives, I must have missed when he said that. That definately would be highly stupid...
Why *not* "hack" an entire site into existance? He seems to think he's hot stuff, so it oughta be easy... and if they are dumb enough to share their C drives full access no password, then they'd probably never be able to figure out how to turn it off... it would at least prove that he could "h4x0r" their systems. :D hell, if he actually has full access to their C drives, he should be able to add a webserver to the system in five seconds flat.
-- Braeus Sabaco
Member of the Roman Legion
Customer/worker at Phenomenal Internet Solutions
This is SO educational! -- Kintaro Oe
He never says the name of the ISP he claims to work for.
Maybe because what he (supposedly) did, while understandable, is actually illegal?
No contact info provided for him at all as far as I could see, no name, no email, no icq, nothing... not even a fake hotmail email address or something...
Maybe because what he did is illegal?
He is hosting this site on some crappy free web server.Maybe because what he did is illegal?
OK, who else thinks Rodona Garst is kinda cute? I mean, she may be an immoral slimeball, but she looks like a fun lady to get together with. Did anyone notice a wedding ring on her finger? Anyone ever find infor about her on any Swingers' sites? Did she write the kinky stories????
r eastSize.htm
Why do I get the feeling I REALLY need a date....
http://homepages.manawatu.net.nz/~alanjb/RodonasB
Matthew Miller,
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
I find it quite interesting that the majority of web search engines return NO pages having the phrase "Rodona Garst". How could this be?
I find it hard to believe in this miracle hacker who manages to take AOL screen shots from afar, but who doesn't know how to turn off his mail server's open relay functionality, which is what enables spammers to use his site in the first place.
Steven, Editor at Large, Sm@rt Partner