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Deconstructing a Pump-and-Dump Spam Botnet
Behind the Front writes "eWeek has teamed up with Joe Stewart, a senior security researcher at SecureWorks in Atlanta, to show the inner working of a massive botnet that is responsible for the recent surge of 'pump and dump' spam. It's a detailed picture of how these sleazy operations work and why they're so hard to shut down. Sobering numbers: 70,000 infected machines capable of pumping out a billion messages a day, virtually all of them for penis enlargement and stock scams. Excellent graphics, too, including one chart that shows that Windows XP Service Pack 2 is hosting nearly half the attacked machines."
If more ISPs did egress filtering of email this sort of thing would be harder to do.
then they would use the massive botnets of 0wned machines for something else, that probably also wouldn't be conducive to the health and general well-being of the internet...
my password really is 'stinkypants'
The charts would be a lot more interesting if they had them compared to market share. then you've got to consider that people are more likely to target the biggest market share. i mean, how many virus writers are targeting FDOS?
It is time to rebuild the email protocol. It needs to be redesigned to cope with modern systems and security needs. The pain of the transition would be worth it. It is just too easy to spoof header info now.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Perused the article to know how to find out if my computer is infected or not but couldn't find anything. This is such an important news for Windows users, at least tell something abou thow to verify if a particular windows machine is having this problem.
Well of course Windows is going to be in the majority of affected machines... There is a dramatically higher number of people in the world using Windows than any other OS, so... wouldn't it make sense?
/.'s tendency to point out everything that appears to be wrong with Windows... but come on, isn't it a little much to explicitly point it out in this case?
As a proud user of Kubuntu, I can relate to
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Which leads me to wonder about the folks who actually believe that those penis enlargement pills work.
And as far as the "pump and dump" spam goes, are there folks who beleive those spams? Or are they of the mindset of the "greater sucker"? Meaning, if I buy this stock now, after this spam circulates, there will be others who buy this shit stock and push up the price allowing me to make money.
Yeah, I know the guy who originates the "buy" recomendation is hoping for everyone to buy the stock, but what makes some of the recipients think they'll make out?
Do you really think that 0.05% of all spam comes from Linux, BSD, MacOS, Solaris and OS/2 lumped together? Then I'll have to disappoint you. Look again. Windows 95 is curiously absent from the graph. How big a part of 0.05% do you think it could handle?
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
This is the basic problem with any single antispam measure, or really any single computer security measure.
1. Someone comes up with a defense mechanism that works well.
2. It works so well that more people use it.
3. It becomes popular enough for the bad guys to beat, so they do.
4. The defense becomes useless, forcing someone to come up with a new defense.
5. Goto 1.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Its like going after Boeing because someone put some tape over the port that allows outside air to get at the gauge that measures air pressure and estimates elevation on a 757.
You can point your finger all you want at the maintenance worker who didn't read the warnings in GIANT PRINT - but Boeing was still sued and paid.
Boeing was not being irresponsible. I do not think the same can be said of Microsoft because many of the security problems have been pointed out CONSTANTLY since before 1995.
"Thats crazy... that's like going after P2P admins for users sharing illegal content. It would never fly."
It's not like that at all, but that's due to a distinction that's apparently too fine for some people.
Take a look at your favorite torrent tracker. Unless it's legaltorrents or something of its ilk, you know they set it up to capitalize on the huge demand for pirated material (and to make ad money off same), you know most of the traffic is pirated material, and you know that the admin knows this. Running a tracker with the belief that you will simply be able to tell the authorities that you're "not responsible for your users" might make perfect sense to a 14-year-old, but they're often unaware of a crucible in the legal profession known as "the laugh test." If it has the proper locomotion, vocalizations, and behavior, smart people don't need to be told that it's a duck.
Now, it might be funny and all to say that yes, Microsoft really does sell XP primarily for the purpose of running botnets and sending spam, but again, you, I, and everybody else know that it's simply not true. Again, the laugh test prevails.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
You should be short selling them, instead.
So a law that mandated safe computing clearly would not be out of the question, and would not be "blaming" those computer users who did nothing more than purchase a brand new PC in order to use it for its intended purposes.
There's a lot of humor potential in going to a site laced with ads and a list of 30 sponsors to read about spam.