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Creators of Massive Botnet Arrested
DigitumDei writes "Dutch police has nabbed 3 men (aged 19,22, & 27) who alledgedly used the toxbot trojan to create a botnet of over 100000 machines. The trio conducted a DDOS attack against an unnamed US company in an extortion attempt, as well as using phishing tactics to hijack PayPal and eBay accounts.
From the article: 'Police seized computers, cash, a sports car, and bank accounts at the three men's residences, and additional arrests are expected. The three were to be taken before a magistrate in Breda, a city approximately 25 miles south of Rotterdam, on Friday.
The botnet was dismantled, prosecutors said, with help from the Dutch National High Tech Crime Center; GOVCERT.NL, the Netherlands' Computer Emergency Response Team; and several Internet service providers, including the Amsterdam-based XS4ALL.'"
This will also give them pause when hiring former hackers. They might think "Is this guy going to give extortionists inside info?"
On the other hand, security folks may have a budget windfall thrown their way. Considering '"Each time the Trojan was stopped by anti-virus defenses, they made a new version," he said. "This was not just a one-off. The sheer number of variants shows this wasn't a crime they committed just once."' Those security people better get to it.
"MY APOCALYPTIC TENOR HAS NOT BEEN DISPELLED!" - T-Rex, qwantz.com
What's the point when you can just put in your maximum bid and eBay raises your active bid as the bidding warrants?
I wonder what it would take to convince the world that these unsecured machines are an actual security threat, rather than an annoyance?
The botnet was dismantled, prosecutors said, with help from...
Why didn't I think of that! That's 100,000 lusers that won't be getting infected again soon, unless they learn enough to reassemble their boxen, by which point...*sigh* What am I thinking? They'll probably just buy new systems and throw the piles of parts out. They'll be back on bot nets by this weekend.
What they need to do is dismantal the owners!
--MarkusQ
The government said themselves that making file sharing a criminal offence just turns a large portion of the population into criminals for no real benefit. This is similar to the drugs policy. From Wikipedia:
So no, the government tends to go after real criminals, rather than waste time on teenagers with too much free time.I always thought that Americans were just plain ignorant about European geography. Now I know it's because you've been going round telling them that Madrid is close to London.
Because real studies have shown that stiff sentences do wonders besides making the pitchfork carying mob happy?
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What I would like to see is all those machines patched up, I would guess that it could be possible to slide a patching program via the bot-net.
Onepoint
p.s. In thinking about this, I find that most likely it would be illegal
if you see me, smile and say hello.
Heh. From what I know of the Dutch, I'd be more likely to believe the submitter was Dutch if there wasn't a grammatical error. I hear they make fun of school kids over there who only speak three languages.
That being said, you're probably right. The most common mistake people make in foreign languages is subject/verb agreement.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I know the ideas and reasoning behind stiff sentences, that doesn't mean it works.
Like amputating a hand after stealing, very scary but does it actually make crime rates go down?
If one isn't afraid of getting caught the sentence doesn't matter.
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
If you look at it on the scale of things then for them thats probably true.. Holland fits 144 thousand times into a country the size like Canada (which is a bit bigger then the states), with distances like that their mindset towards them is different. so that distance would probably be close for their standards.. It's one thing to bitch about their lack of geographical knowledge (which we all know is pretty bad when it comes to overseas knowdledge), but you have to see the other side of the coin as well. How much do you know about the states?, your knowledge about that is probably just as bad as theirs is of europe;)
"If it's true that our species is alone in the universe, then I'd have to say that the universe aimed rather low
Listen, here's a hot tip if you ever want to get on a cops good side ( such as when they are giving you a traffic ticket or whatever ). All you have to do is ask them loudly "Why aren't you out catching the real criminals eh ?" and they will instantly feel warm and friendly towards you and treat you with the deference, courtesy and respect you deserve.
I thought the point of these attacks was to bring the page down so they could no longer conduct business and make money. Gambling, sports betting, high traffic ecommerce sites...places like that lose money per a second when their equipment is down. If the amount it costs to keep the DDOS from happening (the payoff) is much less than the amount of money they would lose if their site went down there is a good chance the people will pay to keep it from happening. At least I thought that was why they would do it.
My Xbox Live Gamer Card
The motivation behind this kind of extortion is (obviously) money. It definitely happens and companies definitely do pay. It doesn't usually happen to the largest and best connected firms, and not that much to US based firms as compared to the rest of the world, but it's going on all the time. It doesn't get a lot of press because victims that pay are very unlikely to publicize the event. It is mostly focused on business that do most or all of their revenue over the net.
You greatly underestimate the trouble an extremely large DDOS network can cause via sheer packet volume. It might make you reboot your server or pay more in bandwidth for the month? First off the targets of these things are using pretty substantial server farms, not your debian server you have your cat's pictures on. The servers may or may not crash but they certainly wont handle the load. And neither will your load balancers, database servers, routers, firewalls, IDS's, the list goes on and on. Not only that but your ISP won;t handle the load either, all of their stuff starts to break. And depending on how far down the food chain you are maybe your ISP's ISP. All the way up to the tier 1 who can handle it but certainly doesnt want to.
The short answer is is even if all of your technology works flawlessly and isn't crashing left and right (which it most certainly will be), you've never bought a pipe nearly big enough to handle the traffic you're getting so your real customer's traffic is taking forever or just getting dropped on the floor. After 6-24 hours of your DDOS problems impacting all their other customers, your ISP gets their providers to null route your IP space, putting you in the dead calm of the eye of the storm. Everything works again now, except your customers can't reach you. If you measure your earnings based on people connecting to your shop or services that is obviously a very big deal.
If you fight, the fight is going to be very tough. First you need a sympathetic ISP that will let you fight and help you fight - that probably isn't your existing ISP and ones that will are in short supply. Basically a tier 1 or major colos that are very undersold so they have the bandwidth to burn without taking out the rest of their customers. Next you need someone who understands what needs to be done and fast and will work around the clock to do it - realistically you're probably looking at maybe hundreds of people total in the US that have a very strong background in such things and would be available - and maybe dozens of people that have actual direct experience (on that scale). They will obviously cost money. So will building a completely brand new intelligent filtering network over night - in addition to the hardware costs of the new boxes and the connection costs for the new ISP - this isnt off the shelf software either, at least probably not.
Maybe you can start seeing why it's a bit more of a big deal than maybe rebooting your software - why people choose to pay - and that's why it's profitable.
What is the real identity of this Dutch ISP XS4ALL? Fighting spammers (though losing appeal), defending the rights of clients to hyperlink and refusing to be bullied by court orders, and now taking down BotNets. Apparently the founders sold out for millions, but they seem to go well beyond the Google "do no evil" philosophy to pro-actively defending the rights of their customers at considerable risk to themselves. It's the kind of company the deserves to win an awful lot of business.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France