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Why Worm Writers Stay Free
savaget writes "There is an interesting Wired article explaining why worm writers are getting scott free despite their destructive deeds." Nothing really new: overworked law
officials, bragging worm writers, you do the math ;) I still find it amazing.
The bandwidth wasted by a successful worm is gigantic. To say nothing of
time and disk space.
SirCam contains this text in its code: "SirCam Version 1.0 Copyright 2001 2rP Made in / Hecho en - Cuitzeo, Michoacan Mexico."
Smith has a hunch that the author of SirCam is or was in Cuitzeo, and is probably a student. Cuitzeo is located 16 miles from Morelia City, which boasts a large university.
Talk about a blinding flash of the glaringly obvious...
Because all the spare law enforcement officials are giving me traffic tickets.
Rolling stop my ass.
"Cyber criminals are like idiot Hansel and Gretels, scattering electronic breadcrumbs that lead straight to them," said retired New York City detective Pete Angonasta. "You just don't see this sort of behavior in other criminals. I've never seen a burglar leaving cute notes crediting the crime to himself. "
This detective must have never watched the old Batman shows.
D'oh.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
how much bandwith is used up during a worm attack such as nimbda
7
This
Why do worm writers stay free?
Would that be free as in beer or Free as in speech?
...or better yet. Use all of that money to build alternatives to the software in use that causes these worms and virii to thrive and grow.
Also, if you are going to draw and quarter a bunch of script kiddes it's also time to start fining and imprisoning the stupid people that execute these trojans.
Why just punish the author? Without a few morons to spread this stuff around, it never would surivive in the wild. Really? How many UNIQUE email addresses did you see the last time one of these things rampaged across your corporate email network. 2? 3?
Take those 3 twits into the corporate atrium and FLOG them.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Free as in beer
Free as in software
Free as in worm author
If you want to write a "constructive" virus, let me make a suggestion:
Target the mail-spamers. Go looking for the popular spam-blaster software and alter it to send 100,000 e-mails an hour to the Whitehouse. Locate 10,000,000 e-mail addresses in a file and randomize the domain and username. Alter the body-text of the out-going message to delete all telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, URLs, etc, and add a message including the senders real e-mail address, phone number, and whatever else personal info can be gleaned from their system configuration. Send pro-terrorism rants instead of adverts and make sure the FBI is on the list of recipients.
I mean, if you are going to cobble together a few dozen lines of VBS, why not make it do something USEFUL?