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Interview with a Botmaster
An anonymous reader writes "The Washington Post is running a fascinating feature profiling a couple of botnet operators who make thousands of dollars each month installing adware on machines they infect. This is by far the most detailed examination of this issue I've seen so far -- and includes an interview with the CEO of 180Solutions, as well as interviews with some of the botmasters' victims. From the story: 'Most days, I just sit at home and chat online while I make money,' 0x80 says. 'I get one check like every 15 days in the mail for a few hundred bucks, and a buncha others I get from banks in Canada every 30 days.' He says his work earns him an average of $6,800 per month, although he's made as much as $10,000. Not bad money for a high school dropout.'"
There are only around 1500 males resident in the town, that's not a large haystack.
Do you really think most high school drop outs spend most of their time in jail?
According to the US census, an all-time high 85 percent of US adults age 25 and over had completed at least high school in 2003. Thus, a conservative estimate of the proportion of adults who dropped out of high school is 15%. (More if you include people in the 16-24 range). According to your comment, there should be a minimum of 7.5% of the population in jail.
The US population is approximately 295,000,000 (US census data)
According to DOJ, there were just over 2 million prisoners in Federal or State prisons or in local jails.
According to your comment, instead of 2 million prisoners (less than 1%, there should be nearly 30 million people in jail.
The picture is no longer linked from the article, but with the post here the damage has been done.
At the end of the article he said how he is thinking of quitting the botnet business and joining the Army to get a college education.
Poor guy, now he'll end up in jail instead of following his dream and getting his ass shot off in Iraq.
in 10.3 and 10.4 Software Update automatically lets me know when and what updates are availible for all Apple software on my machine. If I decline and update of any kind for whatever reason, it lets me know again 12 hours (approx) later, untill I finally update. I wouldn't say your characterization is true of "most versions" of OS X. Can't say for versions or Linux. And why you're grouping OSX and Linux together anyways just seems silly.
"And in fact on Linux/MacOS the user has to manually trigger a software update"
you've never used a mac have you? it is hard not to notice the SECURITY UPDATE icon BOUNCING like crazy on the dock
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
The usual places where you rent botnets, Specialham and Spamforum are down today. When the heat is on, they tend to go offline, but come back in days or weeks.
He actually has half of his face in one of the pictures, and his mouth in another. If one were so inclined, you could splice together the two images to create something that looks like
this.
Not as great as a mugshot, especially with the slightly different perspectives of the two pictures, but it might do. A little reconstruction by a skilled artist, and you could have a really accurate full-face.
He must have gone to Roland High School. Anyone want to give them a call? (918) 427-7419
I feel bad if this kid really had been planning on getting out, but I've known people who "planned" on getting out for years and never did. And I've been cleaning spyware crap off of people's computers for years.
The ______ Agenda