Reflections on Brilliant Digital: Single Points of 0wnership

nweaver writes "Some reflection on Brilliant Digital's plans shows that they have inadvertently created a Single Point of 0wnership: a single machine or small group of machines which, if succesfully attacked, can be used to gain effective control of the Internet. The implications are rather scary: Even if you never touched KaZaA, your systems may be affected if someone manages to attack Brilliant Digital's update service. Who needs a Warhol Worm?".Updated by HeUnique: use these instructions to remove the Brilliant part.

Comments

The good side

[InsaneCreator]

Maybe we could "attack" everyone with outlook express/IE patches, so we finally stop recieving all those self forwarding worms in our e-mail.

Good for them

[knuu]

I think I understand their plan now:

1. Plant studip spamware on a gazillion computers worldwide

2. Head for a small island state somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and start blackmailing governments the world over by claiming to "0wn j00r 1nt4rw3b!". A gazillion children addicted to warez, pr0n and AIM complain to their respective parents, who demand action from their governments. Governments pay up.

3. Profit!

Then again, governments do have armies with guns and ships and stuff so things might get messy in the process. *shrug*

Re:Good for them

[screwballicus]

Dr. Evil: Gentlemen, it's come to my attention that a malicious distributed computing scheme called Brilliant Digital will be setting into motion their trojan in a few days. Here's the plan. We R00T their server, and we hold the world ransom...
(dramatic pause)
Dr. Evil: ...FOR ONE MILLION DOLLARS!

Number Two: Don't you think we should ask for more than a million dollars? A million dollars isn't that much money these days.

Dr. Evil: All right then...
(dramatic pause)
Dr. Evil: ...FIVE MILLION DOLLARS!

(uncomfortable pause)

Number Two: Jon Katz alone makes over nine billion dollars a year.

Dr. Evil: Oh, really?
Dr. Evil: One-hundred billion dollars.
(pause)
Dr. Evil: OK, make it happen. Anything else?

Re:Good for them

[s20451]

start blackmailing governments the world over by claiming to "0wn j00r 1nt4rw3b!"

Or, in the immortal words of Jeff K., "HAHAHHAHHAHAHHAHHAHAHAHAHAH HOW DO YUO LIEK THEM APPALS FELLOWS?!? GRABUALsA!!!!"

Re:Any comments?

[sarcast]

The owner's of KaZaA don't have the same track record.

But I thought they were on the FastTrack...nevermind.

Re:MS Windows isn't installed on millions of PCs?

[CrackerJackz]

True, (and belive me this is hard for me to say this next sentence...) I put more trust in Microsofts updater than Brilliants ... ick I cant belive I just said that :)

What can we conclude?

[sam_handelman]

As such, all three proposed usages: Secure and secret storage, secure and secret computation, and secure content delivery, are all inherently flawed.

This is all to true. Therefore, given Brilliant digital's wicked corporate pedigree, we conclude that they must have a secret, sinister master plan that they're not telling us about.

They've been clever enough to use evil plans as a smokescreen - the plans they've described are just wicked enough that you might believe that they really are brilliant digital's brilliant evil plan. This means that the real evil plan must be extra... brilliant.

Basically, we can divide the possible real evil plans into three categories:
1) Defense related. They're going to hack into NORAD, and hold the world hostage from skull island. The fact that this is physically impossible (because NORAD isn't connected to the public 'net, and so on) never stops Dr. Evil, so it shouldn't be a hindrance for Brilliant Digital.

2) Biblical. Enumerate the billion secret names of god, conjure forth their lord and master, Satan himself. You all saw Warlock, right? Like that.

3) Astrononomical. I know that if I had the computing power of fiteen million consumer level CPU's at my disposal, I'd use it to pull the moon into the earth. 'nuff said.

Either way, we're talking countdown to doomsday, here, and only one man can stop them. I hope Brilliant Digital CEO Kevin Bermeister's mistress is played by Zhang Ziyi; she is so hot.