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NYT Reports Porn Spam Hijacking Network
twitter writes "This NYT story describes how thousands of PCs have been used as porn spambots and reverse proxy servers, and mentions that they could be used for kiddie porn. Finally, though Microsoft is not mentioned, people might start to understand what a monoculture of poor quality software enables."
Try this link
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
here you go
There is no god
Whatever. That won't happen anytime soon.
Just as an example, we brought a remote user's laptop into the shop the other day to update it and found over 250 infected files. Even though we provide the option everytime he logs in to update the virus identites, they hadn't been updated in over a year.
To many people, a computer is like a screwdriver. They could care less about it, they just want to pick it up, make it work, and toss it aside when they are done with it. It's unfortunate, yes, but that's just the way it is.
Ryan O'Rourke
There is a technical writeup here:
http://www.lurhq.com/migmaf.html
Mirror: http://www.joestewart.org/migmaf.html
Interesting thing is, though, that it occurred in the UK, not the US. In the US, he would have been guilty because the child porn statutes are strict-liability offenses, meaning that possession of child porn, even if unintentional, is still a crime.
Yeah, it's a messed up law, but it's not the first one...
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
The article makes a good point about unwitting hosts participating in world-wide spamming. A host that is insecure can become compromised by an automated worm or mailicous attacker and then configured to relay junk mail.
As a system administrator this worries me. Typically we use blocklists for netblocks that are known to be sources of spam. But when a random internet host is compromised and used as a mail relay, this slips past our blocklists (for a while).
The moral of the story is that computer security and spam fighting go together. Though average users don't get the point, it is every internet user's responsibility to keep their host secure both for their own good, and to be a good neighbour.
They probably use MS to generate their forcasts.
Nope, the NOAA is smarter than that, they use Linux
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
......but these days, computer users should have some basic training on "what attachments are likely to contain pictures from grandma - and what aren't!". Otherwise they might end up hosting some illegal warez server in their own house - without their knowledge...
Training is a good idea, but unfortunately it doesn't always work. I have a l-user here at work that has been trained on how to use email securely. Then everyday, I get phone calls about pr0n email that she has received. She takes great delight in explicitlly describing the contents of the message, and then pretending to be offended. Then I get the "Why don't you do something about this" statement. I do have filters on the email server, but unfortunately they only pickup about 85% of the spam. The other 15% get sent to the users and then opened. Luckly I have AV pushed to everyone and configured it so that it can not be turned off or messed with, and every one gets updated nightly. Just based on the AV logs, I can tell you exactly which l-users do not apply the security training.
I worked tech support for an ISP for several years a while ago, and when products like ZoneAlarm started making their way around it was no help.
Even other tech support people came to me everytime a port was scanned, or anything showed up on it. Then those tech support people recommended it to their callers, and the problem got worse.
Of course, 99.9999% of these scans/hits/etc were not attacks and were just routine net traffic. The personal firewalls just builds paranoia of something they don't understand.
no comment
One of the sites I created a while back was a mod site for NwN, I had it hosted by a company Called XO Communications since I didn't have a fast connection at my house. After getting a little notice from the NwN community I of course started getting spam - however I also started getting these weird emails from people saying they would sue me for sending them spam. I didn't know what was going on until I got 15 bounced emails from yahoo saying my messages were undeliverable. I hadn't sent the message and I had no idea who the recipients were. I contacted XO and they told me "Yeah this happens occasionally there really isn't anything you can do, but we have proof that it's not from you so don't worry about getting sued."
Well I didn't appreciate that responce so I changed hosts I tried icestorm and I tried globalhost it would be fine for awhile then it would start again - the more traffic I got the more of a pain in the ass it became to explain to people that I was sorry for something I wasn't doing.
In the end I just stopped caring, unless I ever get a fast enough connection at home to host the site myself it looks like this is somethign that will just happen. And as an end-user I have no control over the security of the website since it is my hosting companies responsibility to lock there shit down. And everyone I've tried seems to have the same responce "well its easy to fake where email comes from, sorry your shit out of luck in having people confuse you with ass holes"
Ave Molech Setting
I want to drive my car to work, you're right. I shouldn't need to know every single component and how it works. I don't need to know the tire pressure. I don't need to understand what the gas guage is for or what the speedometer indicates. I ignore the little blinking red lights, too.
Oh - wait - no, I don't. A car requires a lot of upkeep if you want it to work properly, just like a computer does. I have to change my oil every three months (patch the OS), fill up my car with gas every week or so (update AV software), and need to get it inspected every year (reinstall Windows :)). I also need to watch for any error lights lighting up on my dash and need to take action based on them. (Answering AV software alerts?) If it breaks down, I take the car into the mechanic. He knows far more about cars than I do and can fix it properly and safely.
Why should a computer be treated any differently from a car? Because people have been told that computers are "smart" and are only slowly beginning to learn the horrible truth - they aren't. Computers are dumb. They do what they're told, even if it's harmful, even if it wasn't what was meant (Do What I Mean!). They require constant checkups to ensure that "what they are told" is as close to "what they are supposed to do" as possible.
Computers require upkeep, just like cars. Just like cars, doing the upkeep prevents your doing what you actually want to do - and just like cars, regularly maintaining your computer helps to ensure smooth operation.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
The problem is, you can't use "RunAs" to run Explorer (for file maintainence), or to change some settings (e.g. network connection settings). And I personally had quite a bit of trouble with bluescreens when I tried to change hardware settings as a non-Administrator user via RunAs (on 2000).
However, you are right that for many things, RunAs does the job of sudo. But it's not a complete replacement.
cannot speak for later versions of Windows since I stopped using them, but I never saw a version of windows that does not force you to completely log off and back on to access privileged functions, encouraging people to run with privileges on all the time, because they cannot just enter the password for privileged activities. Su does not exist, nor does sudo.
That may have gotten modded up as interesting, but it's just plain wrong. All modern versions of Windows have the "Run As..." command whereby you can start a process as if you were logged in as any other given user. This includes doing things like starting a Control Panel applet or CD Burning program as Administrator or running an installation program as a Power User.
To do this, just shift-right-click on the shortcut, or use "runas" on the command-line
I clearly stated that I was not up on the latest windows versions. Another poster in the thread has said he was never able to get this sort of thing to work for him.
When OSX or Mandrake install, they provide GUI support for this sort of thing, and install configuration icons, etc. by default that way, so they can easily be accessed by non-privileged users via su or sudo. If Windows XP and Windows 2000 also have GUI support and discourage the user from running as root by default, then I stand corrected. But if it is too difficult for a novice to use in a default installation, then it hardly qualifies.
My neighbor tells me that when he installs XP, it makes them root by default, demonstrating that it is apparently not practical to do security right on that box. Relative novices, on the other hand, use Mandrake's non-privileged defaults easily, supplying the privileged password when performing a GUI management function.
A way to do it without a GUI is no way at all for most users, especially if XP is still commonly installed to log in the default user as root, unlike OSX and Mandrake.
Is the problem just one of your e-mail being harvested off the webpage(s)? If so, try this:
<script language="JavaScript">
function writeAddress(name, domain, msg) {
document.write('<a href="mailto:' + name + '@' + domain + '">');
document.write(msg);
document.writeln('</a>');
}
</script>
Blah blah blah
<script language="JavaScript">
writeAddress('mymail', 'nospam.com', 'E-mail me!');
</script>
Now you've produced a document which displays links to e-mail addresses, without specifying any easily-harvested e-mail addresses in the source of the document.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Fair enough.
But the real problem from the spam point of view is the negligence of consumer broadband ISPs.
Dialup pools block outbound port 25. Why can't attbi.com, comcast.com, and rr.com get their acts together too?
At present, 12.0.0.0/8, 66.0.0.0/8 (fuggit, I'm lazy!) and 24.0.0.0/8 produce nothing but spam, and I block 'em wholesale.
You wanna run an MTA? Fine - smarthost. The 90% of Windoze luzers with SoBig.* and 9% of 0wn3d Linux boxen don't belong on the 'net, and IMO the ISPs where these boxen reside are criminally negligent in not blocking outbound port 25 traffic to anything other than the ISP's outbound mail server.