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Microsoft Offers A Bounty On Virus Writers
Iphtashu Fitz writes "According to news.com Microsoft will announce a bounty of $250,000 on Wednesday for information on who wrote two recent Windows viruses. The bounty is offered for information that leads to the arrest of the people who released the MSBlast worm and the SoBig virus. Microsoft will officially announce the reward in a joint press conference with the FBI and U.S. Secret Service Wednesday morning. This is the first time a company has offered money for information about the identity of the cybercriminals. Could this be the start of a new trend in going after the writers of viruses & worms?"
It's not that hard to deploy a virus and not get caught. There are so many open access points and people who forget to log off of an email account after leaving.. how would you track it?
--
"I'm not bright. Big words confuse me. But Wanda loves me and that should be enough for you." - Cosmo
If you cant fix the bug, just get rid of the bug writers, so that you dont have fix anything! HA!
A morning without coffee is like something without something else.
The not-very-malicious worms that we've seen exploiting e.g. the NT RPC vuln are good things, IMO. They encourage admins to patch their systems, giving black hats less opportunity to do real damage.
I mean you would expect the l33t hackers that wrote the worms to tell a few close contacts...
I suppose we just have to ask the question, in the l33t hacker circles, is money or loyalty worth more?
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
So there will be cyber-bounty hunters..even less scrupulous than cyber-invsetigators and all too eager to claim their prizes. It's pretty easy to frame someone in cyberspace. And if you point the finger at some teenager who happens to have been posting on a 'hacker' website, after planting some code on his machine, people would be all to happy to believe you...Before there was no incentive to do this... but 250,000 dollars...
Theres only so much money they can throw at a problem.
Well, ask any doctor and he'll tell you it's better to cure a disease than to treat its symptoms. No virus writers means no viruses, which means no headline news virus alerts and scares.
Of course, the question is how much of the "disease" is the virus writers and how much is Microsoft itself with its sloppy approach to secure computing?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Even if they do that, they don't scare the people who just a little sneakier than most. And scare tactics doesn't always work. Look at Kazaa. 400+ examples made, and it's still strong.
:)
Oddly enough, disobedience is not an easy thing to squash.
--
"I'm not bright. Big words confuse me. But Wanda loves me and that should be enough for you." - Cosmo
So.. like, is the 250K a signing bonus? Or do they get it in stock options? Of course, the real question is... is it cheaper for MS to pay 250K to jail each person that writes a virus exploiting on of their security holes than it is to pay the developers to avoid creating them in the first place?
The last time I wrote code, it was Morse
Isn't this like the manufacturers of cars that don't have seatbelts putting a bounty on the heads of drunk drivers who crash into their unsafe cars, say, killing families of four in the process?
Yeah, it's all the DUI guy's fault, no product-liability here! In fact, we're really swell guys, closing the barn door after the horse got out and all..
It's a great PR move for people who don't have a sense of irony, which fortunately includes the majority of Americans, and Alanis Morissette.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
The problem is not many people look further than Microsoft products because they know no better, and the mainstream press doesn't do much to help this. Microsoft throwning money into the pot to catch criminals is unlikely to solve the problem, in the UK there's a lot of schemes that offer rewards for finding criminals, but although they often catch people, it doesn't seem to deter people. I mean we can't tell people in the UK that they can install new Windows and doors in their house and not bother to lock them, and installing an MS OS (and to be fair many Linux distributions) without doing a 'lock down' is just as stupid, but most people don't know how to go about securing their PC.
We know that other products aren't perfect but variety in software does do something to reduce the dramatic effect of these worms.
So the more people we can educate about alternatives to Microsoft products such as Mozilla Firebird, Thunderbird and Seamonkey (the app suite) will help to restore some balance and will hopefully reduce the number of email viruses. Commercial alternatives such as Opera should also be mentioned because although I think the interface is awful, other people like it and choice is good. Many home users just use thier computers for web browsing and simple documents, so Mozilla + OpenOffice would do all they need.
Then on the desktop you have various options as well as Windows, although unfortunately for most people they may be depending on it for certain applications. MacOS X is ok, but would require buying new hardware if you currently have an ix86 PC.
People have been starting to see Microsoft as a vendor of poorly-written, insecure software. What this offer makes people see is that Microsoft is just the victim of evil criminals. And you can never blame the victim for the crime...
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Given that the Sorbig virus has been linked to spammers, finding the person who wrote the virus might be a blow against spammers as well. Any trial will be well publicised and having the public connection of spammers==virus writers==evil hackers (yes I know the proper term is crackers, but this is public opinion I'm talking about here)==terrorists could be a big blow against the reputation of spamming so that it is no longer seen as just an annoyance but something potentially dangerous. This probably won't bother the spammers so much but it might help get legitimate companies who hire them give the whole email marketing process a second thought, especially if any connections come up during a trial. "Trial: Virus used to advertise for Company X." "Virus writers hack computers to advertise for X" does not sound good for Company X on the front page. At the very least it might make them more careful about who they hire and who the people they hire outsource to (as I'm sure there will be so much outsourcing something known as "plausible deniablity" will be used).
And a connection in the public consciousness between spammers and hackers who write viruses might give a bit of impetus to the government for harsher anti-spam laws. I mean look at anti-hacking laws vs anti-spam laws. Which one has more teeth and are tougher?
In a country such as Laos, people earn about $75 a month... or $900 a year... if they work from 15 until 65 they will earn $45,000 in their life forgetting the fact that they are extremely unlikely to have work all the time.
So it now becomes a career move to write a virus, get your own brother (or someone you trust) to hand you in and collect the money. You do your time in relative comfort and your whole family is rich (comparatively)...
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
This idea is about as retarded as saying that:
- throwing stones through people's windows is good. It encourages them to buy bullet-proof glasses before a real thief breaks through that window.
- lockpicking into someone's house and spray-painting their walls is good. It encourages them to buy better locks, giving a real thief less opportunity to steal stuff.
- poisoning the neighbour's dog is good. It encourages him to get a dog which won't wag its tail when a (potential) thief throws him a piece of meat.
- keying random people's cars is good. It encourages them to park those cars in proper park houses, where presumably a real thief would have a harder time getting away with their car.
And so on, and so forth. I'm sure you get the idea by now.
Basically, no, there is no proper excuse for vandalism. Neither in the proper world, nor in the IT world. And just as any judge would probably just have a laugh if someone pulled the retarded excuse "but the lock wasn't 100% secure, so it's not my fault" in a break-and-enter trial, the same should apply to breaking-and-entering someone's computer.
And if you do go around keying cars or flooding the net with RPC exploit packets, no matter how well intentioned you are, I do hope they throw you in a nice jail cell, with two convicted anal rapists as cell-mates. Yes, that same heartfelt wish goes to whoever thought that an RPC patching worm is a good idea.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
By offering a bounty on their heads, they only serve to increase the status of worm and virus authors. What was once the loserdom of the script kiddie community is now glamorous.
Now consider what this means to their "secure computing" initiative, how the frustrations from dealing with this shit can make people more accepting of their draconian security measures. Consider the financial benefits of "digital rights management" that they can only realize after the hardware and software is locked down.
You can imagine the conversation that lead to this, like something out of "24" or the Bush administration: Lets allow, no, lets *encourage* a virus 911 so they'll let us lead them to safety!
This bounty is just a PR game to distract from anti-trust, patent violations, anti-competitive fines, security fines. Microsoft's executives and other investors have had enough time now to dump their stock. Game over.
The new trend of spammers writing viruses to make zombie machines is different. I suspect the people behind it are much older, although they may have hired someone of any age to write the code.
Mind you, some conspiracy theorists also claim that the world is ruled by alien lizards, so I think it's fair to take what they say with a pinch of salt.
:-)
... but it has certainly been exploited in analogous ways by the FBI and the secret service to grab unprecidented power in the United States).
... their theory, while quite possibly false, is certainly worthy of consideration, particularly given the amount of historical fact that illuminates similiar behavior by Microsoft in the past.
Yes, but they aren't the same conspiracy theorists.
On a serious note, folks on slashdot (and indeed, people in general) tend to equate all types of conspiracies (and conspiracy theories) and lump them together...somehow equating Enron with the X-Files, at least until Enron is exposed publicly (then, for some reason, people are able to grasp the difference). This is a real problem, because it means that people will live in denial of real-world conspiracies that are taking place (e.g. Monsanto's conspiracy to dump toxic waste into the rural groundwater of the deep American south in the 1990s, or the current SCO conspiracy to defraud their investors and steal the copyright of thousands of software developers around the world) by dismissing them in their minds as no more likely than alien invasion, UFOs in storage at area 51, or silent black helicopters hovering overhead.
We do know conspiracies exist, therefor, it logically follows that some conspiracy theories are likely to be not out in left field, but rather quite correct.
We know as a matter of historical record that the Nazis conspired to stage a "terrorist" act against the Reichstag as a prelude to a coup d'tate, however, listening to the "conspiracy theorists" of the time would have been like listening to a conspiracy theorist today claiming that 9/11 was staged by Baby Bush (it obviously wasn't
Microsoft has a history of conspiring to do dishonest and disingenuous things that directly (and illegally) harm and coerce their customers and their competitors, indeed, they have been convicted of doing so on numerous occasions (the DOJ anti-trust trial and subsequent sell-out being only the latest example). A conspiracy theorist pointing out a economic or tactical political advantage Microsoft might gain through ill-behavior toward its customers is not out in left field
So IMHO it is a mistake (and disingenuous) to equate actions by Microsoft and the copyright cartels that directly threaten our digital freedoms, and the conspiracies that do in fact drive these agendas (even if said conspiracies have the most banal of motivations: greed for cold, hard cash), with tin-foil hats, ghosts, and UFO sightings, as is so often done by the apologists of such groups.
Expressing concern about corporate or government malfeasance (conspired or not) isn't even remotely analogous to X-Files-like nonsense, and it is time we stopped allowing sceptics to use dishonest means (equating suspicion of the Reichstag burning ^H^H^H Microsoft's exploitation of their woeful security record to political advantage, with suspicion of Alien Lizard ruling the earth) to denigrate those who do express such concerns.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
...who is willing to spend a few years out of circulation for $125,000...!
Contact me on 555-EASYCASH.
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
That is one the silliest things I've read in a looooong time.
1) Freedom of the press is only truly open to those who can afford to publish? Uh, hello, communication channels are more wide open today then they have ever been, thanks to blogs, email, newsgroups, P2P, desktop publishing, etc. Of course big corporations have more options available to them, but that is (and has always been) the case just about everywhere in the world.
2) "What will hopefully emerge from this process is a totally new form of government, a meritocracy. In my opinion, music will be the greatest power." Have you taken your meds today, or are we looking at 50 Cent as the new Director of Homeland Security?
3) "the company with the greatest financial clout in the world right now is Microsoft." A software company, no matter how large, hardly wields "financial clout" like a GE, which spans the globe and gobbles up companies in a variety of industries by the handful, or a huge bank like Citigroup, which brokers deals and provides the financing that makes business projects possible. Microsoft is a giant in the software business, but in terms of the overall business picture, they aren't the biggest kid on the block by far.
4) Gates can direct the "full power of the press" to back candidates of his choosing? While Microsoft has a partnership with NBC, I doubt that he spends his time telling Katie & Matt which candidates to pump up.
5) "If my thesis is right, and this is a plutocratic system, then Gates is nominally the king, with no hereditary right of succession as such, unless he can prolong his wealth into the next generation. Well, your "thesis" is dead wrong from the start, and is certainly finished off by the fact that Gates plans to give all his fortune away.
There are plenty of reasons to bash or admire Microsoft, but paranoid fantasies are another thing entirely...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
To some degree a virus wrecking havoc amongst computer using their software can be seen like if somebody was vandalizing your property.
Oops! Be careful with that. Compare the MS business process with real life, and you might raise the specter of product liability.
who are those slashdot people? they swept over like Mongol-Tartars.
(sigh) Here we go again. You weenies really seem to get a hard on about anal rape. Everytime someone mentions crime and/or punishment someone's sure to make some remark like the crap above.
Is it because your not getting enough yourself?
No but, yeah but, no but...
... oh, wait a minute, I'm not.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Is the writer the responsible party or is the person who deploys the virus?
/. How can I be prosecuted? I wrote some code but did not use it or set it free on a network. You could take this to extremes on either side. What if I give code examples? What if I only documented HOW to write code to exploit an existing hole? What if I only describe the hole? I can make a machine gun and provide you with plans for a machine gun but unless I use it to kill people, I did nothing wrong. Seems to me that the prosecutors and MS are trying to hang someone as an example but that is a very fine line. Is there a law that clearly states that you can not knowingly write code that may cause millions of computers to crash? I know this is a touchy subject but I view this software as free speech.
What if I make a spreading virus that works with a known flaw in a MS product. I post this virus and code to say Bugtraq, IRC, or here on
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
Bullshit. That's like saying, "bridge collapses happen." The collapse-free bridge is here, and it's here to stay. Why? Because there are engineering standards that ensure safety. Software engineering is alone in tolerating, nay, encouraging defective products to exist. The "sufficiently large" argument is bullshit as well. I can name any number of staggeringly huge engineering projects, all of which were completed successfully and still stand safely today. And Microsoft can't even write a program to send email without massive defects? Get real.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
from this report:
To give an idea of the scope of the deterioration problem, 150 bridges collapse each year in the US
Yeah, that was 1996, but there were "engineering standards" back then...
As far as I can tell, there's nothing that is Perfect... It doesn't matter how many standards you have in place, humans introduce a certain amount of imperfection into whatever they muck with.
Also, consider that (to the best of my knowledge) no one is out trying to cause bridges to collapse. Now Windoze, on the other hand...
Sure, MS shares some of the blame here - they didn't produce a "safe" product because of market demand etc. But SO WHAT? If I went around cutting the brake lines on all the cars in supermarket parking lots, would you really blame the car manufacturers for not "securing" their products?
My point is that there is going to be a way to break something, regardless of how hard you try to secure it. I'm not saying MS necessarily tried hard enough, but you're arguing that they should have created a perfect product and that's simply not possible.
That that is is not that that is not. That that is not is not that that is.
And if they don't catch one, the publicity is free.
That, in a nutshell, is wit.
Perhaps I'm barking up the wrong tree...But....
Its not JUST that MS makes the default user---
It is also that Windows runs a ton of stupid, random crap in kernel space.
Like Windows Media Player. Like Internet Explorer. Like Outlook. Like a ton of office stuff.
None of that belongs in kernel space.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Script kiddies are probably more likely to be running Windows themselves, 'though. They'll crack what they have access to themselves, instead of something utterly like Linux.
:-p
Someone who trained to use a grenade launcher is going to use a grenade launcher when available, even if pistols are more prevalent.
Or Occam's Razor might say that people dislike Microsoft because Microsoft has been responsible for countless hours of frustration and time wasted due to bad products and no readily available alternative.
It's like buying a lemon from the only car dealer in town that you can afford to buy from. You despise the dealership and the salesman who sold you the car. You despise the owner of the dealership for tricking you.
It's not about how much money the owner has, but how he got the money. People associate Bill Gates with the crap that Microsoft has made billions selling. He's painted his own portrait in their minds--not the media.
Part of the problem, I believe, is the hype that Microsoft raises with new product releases. They generate artificial demand by hyping products that are supposed to solve your problems. Most of the time, the problems aren't solved, and even in the cases where they are, the problems are generally shifted to something else.
Notes From Under *nix: blas.phemo.us
It's both. Having them run in kernel space means a web browser crash can bring down the whole kernel. Having them run as root means an exploit can give access to the entire system. Either one without the other is bad, but together they are the sux0r.
I grew up a few miles away from the "Schoharie Creek Bridge" in the list. A week after it fell, a bridge a bit further up the creek fell as well. The second abutted my front yard. Both fell due to poor engineering.
In fact, the one next to my house was built across a bend in the creek. When they "fixed" it, (eight years later), they built the new one in the same place. Talk about not learning from past mistakes...
Designing secure and bug-free software is a tedious process, but do-able.
The original argument was that building bridges that don't fall down is also "do-able"... Apparently, that's not the case.
There is no way you can guarentee PERFECTION with ANY amount of checks / tests / standards / whatever. Who's going to run the tests? A HUMAN.
Software or not, humans make mistakes. There's nothing you can do about it. Again, I'm not asserting that MS didn't release a product with "too many" bugs. Just that the goal of "perfection" is WAY beyond reach...
That that is is not that that is not. That that is not is not that that is.
Gee, I knew what most of these posts were going to say before I even read them. Most of them say that this is just a marketing ploy by Microsoft to deflect criticism, that Microsoft's poorly written code is what is really the cause, and Microsoft this and Microsoft that and oh, by the way Linux rules.
Let's put all of that aside for a minute. I'm not going to be pro-Microsoft or Pro-anything here. I am going to be Anti-virus writer though.
Cyber-crime be it scams, viruses, trojans, worms, password/identity theft, carding or whatever affects all of us personally. It does because it casts things like the internet, ecommerce, and technology in a poor light. It causes "big money" to think twice before they invest in technology, it causes things like e-voting to come more slowly to the forefront and, it forces companies to take sometimes extreme security measures.
In a sense, the 'net hasn't matured yet. It can be compared to the Wild West where crooks didn't have to run very far or hide very long or even worry very much about getting caught. I have no doubt that over time we will see the net change and cyber-criminals and other scumbags will have more to fear. But right now, a wanted poster with a reward is appropriate. It is what Wells-Fargo did to catch outlaws way back when and it will work as well today.
blame on me for careless examples. If I'm not mistaken, video drivers run in kernel space, so should have been my example for that. I didn't mean to imply that IE was both a kernel service and run as root, just that those two parts of the Windows platform in combination are bad. And to be fair, the IE rendering code is in system DLLs, so it's not an unreasonable misunderstading to think some of it might be running in kernel space. As for stuff needing to be logged in as administrator, I have a linksys wireless card which, using the current drivers, is useless unless I am logged in as an administrator. Note that I mean 100% useless, it will not associate with an AP unless I am an administrator. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the driver, I even went through two levels of Linksys support. So in order to have my wireless internet access without buying more hardware, I must run as administrator. :( Fortunately I just run Linux all the time.
I've been wondering for a while why we haven't seen any really nasty virus epidemics -- I'm not talking massive DDOS, or spamfloods. I'm talking, a virus that infects a few million hosts over the course of a day or two, and then at a predetermined time, starts formatting the hard drive.
Given how fast some recent viruses seem to have spread, it certainly seems feasible. So why do these viruses always have fairly innocuous payloads? It would seem a relatively simple thing to write a virus like this -- not to mention release it anonymously and never tell anyone about it. Is it just that the people capable of doing this are all ethical enough not to? Or that the ones who aren't ethical enough, are dumb enough to get caught? Or that nobody, I mean nobody would want to see the havoc wrought by such a virus?
Why haven't we seen a virus like this yet? Is it because such a virus isn't possible, or just because no one's bothered yet?
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Seriously, the PR design here is quite good: shift the blame. By putting a bounty on the bad guys, Microsoft frames the issue as the bad guys are the problem, and gets the heat off Microsoft's absymal security. I congratulate Microsoft's PR talent here. Very slick.