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Infected PCs for Rent
prostoalex writes "UK authorities are raising concerns about entire networks of infected and compromised PCs (BotNets) being available for sale or rent to the highest bidder. The Register quotes a detective from Hi-Tech Crime Unit saying 'The trade of BotNets of compromised machines is becoming an industry in itself. Organised crime is making use of this industry.'"
Bah, this is definitely *not* grid computing. Grid computing is sorta like clustered computing, but not quite, where it's possible to purchase CPU cycles from the grid for use in high-performance computing applications. Think a beowulf-for-hire, only the nodes aren't necessarily commodity hardware (for example, here in Western Canada, there's a project to build a grid connecting various academic supercomputing resources).
These zombie-nets, OTOH, are simply large networks of computers that can be asked to do the same thing on a large scale. BFD. Hell, I wrote some Perl code to do just this for administration of a testbed during one of my previous jobs. It's nothing new, and most definitely not an advancement of technology.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
I think that's a really dodgy view of Grid computing. Grid computing is essentially resource/service sharing across heterogeneous nodes (i.e. different types of machines - macs/pcs/microscopes/etc). To do that, the Global Grid Forum are developing a load of standard protocols and methods for getting everything to inter-communicate.
As far as I'm aware, there is currently no standard way of purchasing CPU cycles or similar, although there are a number of working groups whose remit probably covers this.
The beauty of the Grid is more in being able to seamlessly connect to pretty much any hardware resource you want - I suspect that in reality, the actual economics will be dictated more by existing commercial agreements more than anything else.
RTFA!!!...virus writers are renting out control of infected machenes whos users are clueless...OMG
You've NEVER used EFNET, have you?
This shit has been happening for years, virtually unchanged. The only difference is that now it's slightly more automated than it used to be, slightly more publically visible, and slightly more capitalist in nature. But what this article is describing was totally standard for the botnet wars in 1997, just then it was Wingates and "shells" instead of worm infections and "Zombies".
(Posted AC because I'm paranoid.)
My guess by looking at the reject logs of my mail server is that it is at least an order of magnitude larger. These machines are not "owned" by all the same hackers / spammers though, so the impact that one hacker has is not as large as you would think.
18 USC 1030a refines this:
The courts have been very liberal in how they define damages to computers; shutting down a government department for a few hours would easily meet this criteria.
So if they're the government's and you say "do this thing or else I'll DDOS your computers", it's definitely terrorism.
The interesting question is, under this law, would it be terrorism for me to say "Senator Levin (our excellent senator from Michigan), if you don't vote against DMCA II, I'm going to have all of my friends email your office" if doing that results in crashing their mail server, forcing them to buy a new one for more than $5K? I guess ambiguities like that are what you end up with when you write a several hundred page law in a few days, as the Patriot act was written.
My Web Page
I'm the helpdesk for a medium-sized enterprise and I look after the MIMEsweeper and Exchange boxes
Since about 3 months ago we have been receiving an infected email approximately every other second, mainly during office hours
It's mainly Netsky, or similar and the balance of versions is leaning heavily toward the new 69 and 70kb versions, meaning a lot of people are getting "upgraded" to the latest release. The timing suggests it's mainly office PCs
We're frantically telling all our group companies and contractors to virus-check, and calling-in our laptops, but it is still flooding in.
I'm starting to make a case for using Linux on every PC that doesn't require a Win32 application, as all the usual hassles of managing a linux roll-out pale into insignificance compared to the virus danger our systems are currently under.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU