Return of the Web Mob

Parore writes "eWeek is running a story about the return of the web mob, highlighting all the similiarities between the online attacks and the real-world mafia. From the article: "Black hat hackers have set up e-commerce sites offering private exploits capable of evading anti-virus scanners. An e-mail advertisement intercepted by researchers contained an offer to infect computers for use in botnets at $25 per 10,000 hijacked PCs. Skilled hackers in Eastern Europe, Asia and Latin America are selling zero-day exploits on Internet forums where moderators even test the validity of the code against anti-virus software."

Comments

People that matter don't care

[liliafan]

There is obviously a problem with botnets, virii, and trojans, part of the problem comes from a 'not my problem' attitude from law enforcement and ISP's.

Dozens of times when networks I maintain have been attacked I have contacted ISP's with all the information they would need to trace the user performing the attack and notify them that their machine is infected, however, the response I usually recieve is, 'it is our policy not to blah blah blah', when I have had verified hack attempts on my systems and have notified the authorities about it, I have been transfered all over the place, put on hold, transfered a little more until I completely loose interest, when I do get to report something it never gets investigated.

Until the people that can actually do something about these zombie machines and malicious users, get off their asses the problem will just keep getting bigger.

And people wonder...

[John Hansen]

... why other people can take advantage of their computers?

I run a network in a medium-sized business. When I came in, there was no IT staff to speak of. All the workstations were Dell computers, mostly running the default installations of Windows XP. There was a Windows 2000 domain controller set up, but most of the computers were not set up for the domain, meaning that there were no default security policies. The E-mail server had an antivirus scanner installed but it wasn't updating its definitions.

Since I came in, I've had to reformat & reinstall at least half of the workstations because they've been infected with spyware and viruses. This is because, despite having virus scanners, spybot scanners (Microsoft Anti-Spyware, Spybot, and Ad-Aware), and Firefox installed, the absence of IT staff meant that the company staff were ignoring spybot warnings, the antivirus was not up to date, and they were browsing the web with Internet Explorer.

I'm still fighting the use of Internet Explorer, since we have no real reason to be using it -- most all of the websites we access are Firefox friendly. However, the momentum means that I can't just block out access to it in the domain policy. People need to migrate their bookmarks and preferences over, and that isn't done overnight. It's maddening.

So who do I blame when I see headlines like this, or when I look at the company I work at and see a mess? My first point of blame lies with Microsoft for creating such a vulnerable infrastructure to begin with. And that's not because I'm an anti-MS or Linux zealot. It's true, I run Linux at home on every computer. It's also true that since coming in, I've set up a number of Linux servers and a Linux firewall. I know how to work with Microsoft products and lock them down to a reasonable state. It's just that it frustrates the hell out of me when a product built-in to the operating system has so many vulnerabilities, and it's a freaking product used to browse the web! Not something essential to the system like the kernel (which has problems too)... a web browser! Something that should have no system access!

So yes, I lay most of the blame for this kind of travesty at Microsoft's feet. Had they actually thought their design through before they started coding, I can almost assure you that we would not be having this kind of problem to begin with. There would be viruses for Windows, yes. There would be worms for Windows, yes. But I find it unlikely that a properly-designed Windows would have made it possible for there to be millions of zombie PCs across the world, able to be bought by the highest bidder.

The rest of the blame I lay on user education. Most people with computers are totally oblivious about what's on the Internet. They just click on the big 'e' and surf their favorite porn sites, check email for funny comments, et cetera. And then they wonder why they get hundreds of popups and their computer runs slow as frozen molasses. Some of this could be stopped if network admins took some effort to educate their users in a business environment (herculean but possible, and I know some organizations actually do so). Which leaves the home PC users. What do you do about them? Well, I think that's more Microsoft's responsibility, since they're the ones who created the product.

In the meantime, I'm setting up Ubuntu for people who want it, or giving out CDs with it on them and directions. And most people I've switched have been quite happy with it, since their main needs are web browsing and Email and it covers those. So until Microsoft produces a product that I can actually recommend to my mother, I cannot recommend Windows.