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Vigilante Hackers use Old West Tactics for Justice
dismorphic writes "Angered by the growing number of Internet scams, online 'vigilantes' have started to take justice into their own hands by hacking into suspected fraud sites and defacing them. These hackers have targeted fake websites set up to resemble the sites of banks or financial institutions in recent weeks, and have inserted new pages or messages. Some say 'Warning - This was a Scam Site,' or 'This Bank Was Fraudulent and Is Now Removed.'" So maybe it's not a posse of horsemen, but it's still kinda cool that someone is taking care of those who would defraud the public.
i love how gov. agencies will probably crack down on the hackers defacing the phishing sites, but do little to nothing about the phishing sites/people themselves its all about the quick solution, not trying to go towards the deeper problem
Larson added, "We would rather see the industry itself find solutions."
So would we.
We just don't see enough people hanging from trees for marrying outside their race.
Oh, your concept of right and wrong is different from mine?
If you don't have a trial with evidence, all you are doing is creating cycles of revenge, with no resolution. With a justice system, wrongs can be righted, and then we are done with the matter.
There is no justice system that is totally perfect, but resorting to vigilantism when justice isn't perfect would make the situation much much worse.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Unfortunately, it seems to take FOREVER for the law to make a difference in these cases, if anything is ever done at all. The simple fact is that it's difficult, at best, to try to track and arrest an international criminal. I'm generally not one for vigilantes, but when it takes 5 months to catch the bastard legally, I'm all for taking the sucker out of business by other means.
I have a little PHP script that I use whenever I get a phishing email. The script generates fake credit card numbers, expiration dates, etc. and repeatedly hits the phishing site's form dumping in random info.
;)
Any halfway intelligent phisher would record the IP address of each submission and just dump all of mine when he saw there were bogus, but it makes me feel good that I at least wasted some of his time
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
and meanwhile, while all of this time is passing waiting for arrests and trials, they fraudulent websites are robbing people who don't know any better. I don't fully endorse the defacing the sites but it's something and it works quicker than waiting for the justice system to catch up. It's not a resolution, but it is a deterent, not to mention if the justice righted the wrongs and we were already "done with the matter" the vigilantes wouldn't have fake sites to deface.
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
Hacking into these legitimate companies doesn't do anything to hurt the scammers.
?
You think that it doesn't hurt phishers when their "closer" is rendered inoperational? Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm going to bet that some phisher that used their botnet to send out millions of emails (losing a number of their bots in the process) is going to be pretty pissed when some whitehat knocks their server offline before all of the morons enter their username and password.
Slippery slope argument? In this case it's pretty clear that GOOD came out of this, did not make any situation much much worse.
Actually, slippery slopes sometimes start like this. With a clear cut case of right and wrong. But tomorrow it might be used as precedents for other actions. For example, DMCA "violators" might find their site defaced with a sign that says: "This software brakes the law and the author is a criminal".
When someone bypasses the rule of the law and proper procedures and takes justice into his own hands, and "the system" looks the other way or even condones the action, it opens the door to all other sort of vigilantism.
No sig
Aren't we the same people that worry about the goverement taking away our right of do process with the Patriot act. I'm sure the goverment probably uses some of the same reasoning. "It would take month to get this court order to tap the phone line"
That said I really don't care about these sites getting defaced, if they accidently deface a legitimite site well then I think they should be punished.
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
Like I said I don't fully endorse what they're doing, and one of the reasons why is because it can spiral out of hand. But I can understand the intent and I can appreciate standing up for the average consumer who doesn't know that they are getting taken advantage of, there is some sort of neighborhood justice there. It's not good, but I don't think it's bad either, I'd say it falls in a favorable area of gray and as long as it stays there, I can live with that.
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
The problem with vigilantes is this:
What happens when they come after YOU, and you don't have due process to protect you?
-d
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
This is, of course, the problem with vigilante justice, and the reason it is illegal. The 'outmoded' idea of due process that makes our legal system too slow do deal with phishing and other fraudlent sites are designed to make sure the only the guilty are punished, and that the punishment is comensurate with the crime. If I get my paypal 'change your password' scam-of-the-week email, go to the site it points to, hack in, and shut down their webserver, I have maybe stopped some crimes being committed. But I refuse to trust myself to do so without disrupting anyone elses business, leaving the server open for other spambots and the like, or in general causing a mess. In the world where the chances of the perpetrator being caught were high, by hacking in myself, I might even destroy evidence that could be used to legally prosecute them.
- For instance, in the recent article about 911 and Vonage, virtually every post supporting Vonage and calling the victim 'stupid' was modded *up*, whereas virtually every one criticizing Vonage for it's misleading marketing material was modded *down*.
- In a recent article about militarizing space, virtually every article criticizing the Administration and misreading the various treaties was modded *up*, while pointers to correct interpretations of the treary was modded *down*.
- In virtually every article about the Shuttle, posts praising Soyuz are modded *up*, and posts pointing out that it's not as safe as propoganda would have you believe is modded *down*.
The same can be seen in any article about MicroSoft, SCO, and a vast variety of other topics.Slashdot is indeed ruled by a mob - a mob extremely intolerant of dissident views and facts that fail to meet it's fore-ordained conclusions.
Certainly - If you define 'freedom' as 'I can do whatever the hell the I want without any restrictions or respect for other peoples rights, except maybe the people I agree with'. The same Slashdot that gets annoyed about GPL violations is the same Slashdot who openly espouses theft of *other peoples* IP.And that's the ultimate tragedy of vigilante justice - it's almost always represents the views of the 'men on white horses', not those of society.
It's almost utterly unregulated and unpoliced - except for very small corners. And virtually all of those small corners are intolerant of anything 'not them'. They aren't about freedom - they are about bigotry and isolationism.In this case, they're marking the site so that later 'marks' recognize that the site isn't legitimate -- but otherwise leave it up and functional. Yes, it might run over some forensic info, but given the dearth of arrests for these scams, it's rather productive to save some newbie's but (and bucks) from these people.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.