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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.'"
This is sick. This is a terrible misuse of the internet. People installing this sort of software on other peoples' computers should be shot on sight - or connection. There needs to be a removal of the incentive for them - such as cutting the money they would receive down to almost nothing.
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
So he sits home and chat all day? that sounds like a pretty empty and dull life to me.
I would not mind not having to work for the money, but i would properly do some programming or simular nerd activites.
Just sitting and chatting is okay, but not allday everyday.
Freedom or George Bush
It is a fascinating article, a kind of anti-CEBIT that must be played out in thousands of trailer parks and down-at-heel developments all over the world. No real surprises, though. Organized criminal activities are probably the same everywhere: long periods of boredom punctuated by brief spurts of intense activity, and all supported by lies of the "Naturally I wouldn't sink this low if my victims weren't so dumb they deserved it" kind.
I'd still like to see the CEO's of the top six IT companies put on a public platform and made to answer some tough questions. Like, with all their personal billions and access to hundreds of billions in corporate funds, what are they actually doing to track down guys like these and nail them? So far as I can see, the answer is "As little as we can get away with". And the Feds seem to be used as a get out: we've handed the matter over to the Feds so there's absoutely nothing we can do, nudge nudge wink wink, wanna buy Symantec Internet Security cheap to you squire?
Until the IT industry grows up enough to start dealing with some of the consequences it has created, I don't think it deserves anyone's support. And meanwhile Botmaster Dirtbags everywhere will continue to flourish. Just my two cents.
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is that what we are calling script kiddies these days?
One has little impact on anyone but himself, the other causes headaches for people all over the world.
Some priorities!
...of the people who frequent /., a lot of you sure seem to be ignorant. How many of you actually completed reading the article? You're quick to talk all kinds of smack about this guy, what a douche he is, etc. but it seems nobody has read near the end of the article where he talks of coming to realize that what he's doing can't last forever, and isn't really all that great, and that he is actually looking at making something of himself instead of doing the crap he currently is. While I don't like what he's been doing, I do applaud his self realization, and the fact that on his own he is admitting it's not great, and actually voices aspirations to do better things, to gain a little discipline. The knowledge he has now and uses to do bad could just as easily be used to do good, and be every bit as lucrative and exciting for him.
Just a little advice folks, as with anything else, be sure to have the whole picture/story before going off half cocked, because it makes you look as dumb as the kid in the article sounds.
I never thought that journalists might leave metadata in their images -- I thought that they'd have some sort of automated content management system that would take in a TIFF or whatever and spit out a JPEG of the appropriate size for the current design of the web page.
I'm now wondering how many other news stories might have very much unintended data leaks through metadata tags in images. Possibly quite a hell of a lot.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.