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WMF Exploit Sold Underground for $4,000
tero1176 writes "Eweek has a story with information from Kaspersky showing that exploit code used in the WMF malware attack was being peddled on underground sites by rival Russian hacker groups for $4,000 in early December. The first sign of an exploit was traced back to the December 1, 2005, a full month before anti-virus vendors started noticing mysterious WMF files rigged with malicious executable code. It serves as more proof that the market for malware is well and truly alive."
Do you suppose Microsoft will try to enter this market, too?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Will my AT&T "platinum," "gold" and "silver" levels of Internet access provide access to this underground market ?
So you think Mac and Linux are as unlikely to be unaffected by such?
While it might be hard to purposely code exploits into Windows and Mac, if you were an insider plotting to take advantage of it some day and don't mind losing your job over it. Isn't it more possible to pull a fast one on Open Source, assuming you covered your tracks well enough the few would find it on first glance.
I remember a mud client, early version of Tintin, IIRC, which would make all players shout "Snowy rules, OK" if a client saw some particular text. Not necessarily as bad as it could have been, someone could code the client to [remove all, drop all, flee] on a command if they had wanted. People only became aware of the stunt after the coder logged onto a mud and said "yo"
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
There have been shadowy glimpses of this "other economy" for a while, in the bot army cottage industry and the various rackets where popular sites are threatened with black-out if they don't pay for "protection". But all that is just the warmup to the big show.
Organized crime has found the internet, and they seem to like what they see. It's just like one huge, dark alley lined with endless smoke-filled lounges. Lots of seamy places to meet up. Anonimity if you want it. Under-the-table dealings. Faceless bosses and eager young turks with itchy trigger fingers.
The perfect growth media for scum and parasites.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
This is a huge issue that the general public is completely unaware of. Most people still believe that viruses are created as an annoying prank by kids with something to prove. This may be true in some cases, but most of the malware out there now is created for a very specific purpose: building a botnet that can be sold for cold hard cash to the highest bidder. Who's buying them? Spammers.
It used to be that spammers would look for open relay servers in third-world countries, and let those servers do all the work of actually sending the messages. The server administrators either didn't care, or didn't know how to fix the problem, and the language barrier made things difficult. So, people started making blacklists of known open relays, and just refusing any mail that came from those IPs. Spammers would keep finding more open relays, and the blacklists grew.
Eventually, mail servers started coming pre-configured not to allow relaying, and as servers were upgraded, spammers had to move on. Spammers started commissioning worms, paying people to write software that would infect Windows machines remotely over the Internet, and open up a backdoor for the spammers to access. Suddenly you've got hundreds of thousands of IP addresses responsible for sending spam, with many of them on dynamic IPs. There's no good way to blacklist them all, since they keep changing!
Enter Windows XP Service Pack 2, with a software firewall enabled by default. As people upgrade, worms like Code Red and Nimda are no longer effective. So what's next? Spreading viruses through e-mail, IM, and the Web.
So, look for improvements in antivirus software in the next couple of years, as the war against spam continues. Then look for the spammers to find a new way to get their crap into your inbox.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Ironically, copies of the exploit were pirated by a group of Chinese hackers and sold on Ebay for pennies on the dollar...