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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.'"
Install distcc, and install Gentoo in record time.
Kinda sad to see IBM, HP, and others lagging so badly in commercializing this important new technology.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Good to see big industry players using their expertise and experience to enable new market creation.
Damn, one more thing I can't do with my mac.
If you can sell it, you can get stung selling it. This may be the sort of thing that law enforcement agencies need in order to start busting people.
While it is deplorable that it takes criminal action (or porn) to move technologies to the forefront, it does happen. This, to me, seems like the famed "Grid Computing", and whilst stopping criminals, I hope law enforcement learns enough to pass the knowledge on so that others can use it for legitimate computing.
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With the number of known vulnerabilities in Microsoft operating systems, (not to mention the ones we don't even know about) it is really not hard to imagine these botnets being frighteningly large. I read one article that estimated the current number at something like 100,000! I'm doubt it's enough to bring down the entire Internet, but this could still be capable of providing some crushing DoS attacks, a la SCO.
Gives some merit to distributed hosting companies like akamai, etc.
I'm sure this will be redundant by the time it's posted, but at the bottom of the article:
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Me? I'm pulling IPv4 stakes up. Only been spammed once by someone with an IPv6 address.
Looks like the only person using IPv6 is a spammer!
In Soviet Russia computers rent you.
I find this article on infected PC's/networks for rent so full of sh..#$.\10# \AE \3H......
Welcome!
This PC is for rent.
Please contact us at
www.Claria.com
The scope of this is huge - true - I'm no industry player or top level developer - but still - we can all see the scope of this.
distributed applications are the killer app of the internet - XAML, .net, Java - all buzzwords. Grid computing - thanks to Oracle - The Internet - so much scope it created the biggest financial bubble in the history of capitalism.
Now - the corporates (MS?) are getting so inept that criminal gangs are stealing our future off us. Please - let's start stopping them.
i'm trying to give up sigs.
A guy I know runs his unpatched Windows XP computer 24/7, and never does virus scans. The other day he got 1000+ (around 400mb) executable files in his C home directory. I asked him what he plans to do about it, and surprisingly enough he didn't want to apply critical updates. He said he doesn't care what people do to his computer, because he does nothing important on it. It amazes how many people must think like him.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
I strongly believe that the most effective way to end this would be to scan for compromised nodes, identify them, and KNOCK THEM OUT. Then the user can call the local home-computer fixit guy to come fix their computer. He'll see it's infected with malware and fix it. User gets his computer fixed, fixit guy makes a buck, and one less node is spewing out sh*t.
Yes, I know this approach would be illegal. A felony computer crime in fact. I want legislation to make it legal and justified. I see it as self defense. Compromised nodes are clogging the internet with crap and the best defense is to knock them off-line. If I were standing in the middle of the freeway, clogging traffic and causing accidents the police would come remove me, by force if necessary. I see zombie nodes on the internet the same way.
-=-=-=-=- osjedi uses Debian GNU/Linux. -=-=-=-=-
Isn't that like saying we should blame the dumb shit who doesn't install an anti-theft device in his/her car? Or the auto makers for not making it standard?
A thief is a thief. An extortionist is an extortionist. A duck is a duck.
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Distributed DDOS on an organization's servers IS NOT TERRORISM already (unless explicitly accompanied by physical violence or threats of physical violence). Sheesh, have we all been that brainwashed already by Bush and things like Patriot Act?
If DDOSing some servers is "terrorism", then so is almost every single crime in the book.
An interesting idea.
If we take our cues from nature, I would expect that long before the predators exhaust their supply of prey, they will turn on each other. Each predator's worms/virii/malware will begin to not only infect machines, but destroy competitors' malware that has already infected the machine.
In fact, come to think of it, the most effective way to own a box is to infect it, destroy any competing malware, and then patch the exploit that allowed you to infect it in the first place! We may begin to see host-healing worms that do just this. (Without the ability to kill off competing infections, however, this practice is only marginally useful.)
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.)
While I would have agreed with you a few years ago, the problems are so frequent and the mass userbase so non-technical, that blaming the user just doesn't cut it. Many users DO update their software / AV yet still get hit. At some point the manufacturers of software need to take more responsability. Someone can take home a brand new Dell, plug it in, connect to the internet, and before the first patch gets downloaded end up with a worm. It's fast, damn fast. If you're going to make grandma or little Johnny your target market, then you damn well better make sure that the product is shipped secure to begin with, and maintains itself.
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.
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