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Tech Lessons From the Bad Guys
Chris Lindquist writes "Organized crime, porn peddlers, gambling sites — they all use technology to make a killing. CIO.com has posted several stories that spell out how the seedy side uses IT for profit. From the online techniques of penny stock scammers to innovation lessons from a pair of 'accidental pornographers,' to what you can do to fend off cybercriminals, find out what they do right when they're doing wrong."
How does one become an accidental pornographer? 'Oops! I took a full color spread of you nude by accident last night'?
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
money making tip: get slashdot to link to your pop-up ridden pages
ad free print links:
http://www.cio.com/article/print/117150
http://www.cio.com/article/print/117050
http://www.cio.com/article/print/117201
mod me funny
Online crimes all tend to face the same obstacle: payment.
At some point, you'll want to spend your ill-gotten gains. Don't be surprised if there is an FBI agent waiting for you at the bank.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
.... That people actually paid for porn so that these guys could make a buck!
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Without becoming a spammer/pornographer? Click-links don't pay what they used to.
Petty stock scams? Organized crime? Sure, I can see that as being 'wrong', though calling "organized crime" wrong is a tautology.
I, for one, do not believe peddling porn or hosting a gambling site are 'wrong'.
Sure, some porn is created in a manner that is harmful to the participants (such as taking advantage of drugged/underage/unwilling subjects). And some people cannot handle gambling -- and fixed games, or games where the players are misled as to their chances of winning, are wrong.
But to generalize that they are all bad? If they are, I don't want to be right.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I was looking for a job and had posted my resume on line (monster.com I think) and got a call from a guy looking for an admin with web server skills. The third or fourth question was if I minded the fact that they would be pr0n servers.
I had to turn them down, and no I don't remember the company name.
So, if you have the right skill and are in a big city market, who knows. You might just get a call.
You mean to tell me that people actually get paid for porn, and it's not real?
And all this time, I thought they were just really good actors with big boobs and genitals.
"Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
Streaming video: YouTube made it famous; adult movies made it economically viable.
Thank you YouTube?
Videoconferencing: Businesspeople increasingly use online chat and embedded video rather than conducting face-to-face meetings. Before that, it was used to communicate with Live! Girls! Now!
Face-to-what?
Digital rights management: Through their disregard for intellectual property rights, adult sites helped spur the music and film industries to apply DRM to their online content.
Wait. So we've got the pr0n industry to thank for DRM?
E-commerce: The content on adult sites was so compelling (to some), it helped people overcome their fear of using a credit card online, according to Frederick Lane, author of Obscene Profits: The Entrepreneurs of Pornography in the Cyber Age.
First DRM and then identity theft . . .
I wonder if my boss would go for me doing some cross-training with a pr0n site developer . . . hmmmmmm.
First and foremost, user stupidity works for them, not against them. And second, they don't care jack about any rules or regulations, since they're breaking the law already anyway, so why bother with privacy laws or possible damage claims when you're already scamming the stock market or doing a virtual bank robbery?
You cannot apply that "information" to legal businesses. Or at least, you definitly shouldn't.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Bad guys... Banks? Oil companies? Diamond mines? Televised church services? (There are plenty of IT-using "legit" businesses that display questionable moral values too.)
How long till pr0n industries get organized and start pulling off mafia style lawsuits against file sharers? Pornographers Association of Wasted Nudes (PAWN)
"PAWN accuses 7 year old of browsing porn sites" "PAWN seeks $8 million in damages from dead man (Died of a heart attack while looking at bootleg pornography)"
Give Kashyyyk back to the Wookies
Do you know that Western Union doesn't require you to legitimate yourself when withdrawing money if it's not more than (IIRC) 6k bucks? So all you gotta do is find some gullible moron, who'll "work" for your "international financing company" by offering you his account for a transfer. You have your target transfer the money to this moron's account and have him transfer the money via WU, and inform you about the transfer code. He can keep, say, 20% of the stolen money, and hey, who'd turn that offer down, about 1k bucks for 2 hours work? Almost too good to be real!
Then you (or if you're a larger organisation, one of your goons) goes to WU, hands in the transfer code and heads out with the money.
Of course the "financial agent" gets caught. But that's no loss, you know, there's an idiot born every minute, you'll find others.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
With the U.S. adult population reading at the Grade 5 Level, theft has never been it easier.
Enjoy.
Prezidenshully yours,
George W. Bush
But now you've gone and given lessons to the entire Slashdot community!
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
Quote:
I don't have vendors paying the freight to conferences at swank resorts to convince me to invest in something that's half-developed and overhyped. I never use jargon. I spend zero time doing PowerPoints.
Makes me wonder why these people are so much more smart than the average CIO that only knows how to "deploy" the latest crap that comes from that city in Washington.
Maybe because it's really their neck on the line, that's what I call responsibility.
how long until
After reading the first "fictional CIO" article I have to wonder how much of this article is the fantasy of a journalist trying to sell subscriptions.
The article makes it all sound so slick and organized. I have to wonder how much is made up nonsense, and how much is real. It's not that anything in the article is all that unbelievable, it's just that it's all written from the perspective of someone inside. Something said journalist likely has little to no clue about.
AccountKiller
Don't think of it as a problem. Think of it as job security. The more bad guys, the more jobs for IT security experts.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"By its very nature, arousal is impulsive, ... Mobile brings immediate gratification. With the Internet, you have to wait until you get home."
Great, now you can do it in public!
Building the games with Flash means that users can play them without having to download anything.
Last time I checked, every time I visit a site which uses Flash, I get a message telling me I need to download Flash to view their site (I don't have Flash on my systems).
I'm not sure what their definition of "without having to download anything" is, but to view a site which uses Flash, you need to download something.
Ok, nitpick over.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Unless they're peddling illegal porn, or through dubious methods such as spam or popup-flooding, what makes pornographers bad guys, except that perhaps they don't fall under certain groups' moral or religious views of good.
The rest: penny-stock scammers, cybercriminals, are just that... criminals. There's no crime in porn, so long as the proper laws are observed.
Excuse me?!?! Hey kdawson, if you don't like porn or gambling, then don't indulge in them. On-line or in the real world. If you had paid attention, you would find there is NO reference in the article to Organized Crime and nowhere does it call anyone or anything "bad". At best, there's links the site shoved in to other articles regarding cybercrime and the mob. Furthermore, the article passes no judgment in terms of depicting porn or gambling as bad (it's a business article- they're just forms of business after all). So the next time you approve an article, how about bothering with at least an accurate assessment? And lay off the criticism of porn. This is /. after all, it's the only lovin' some of the loyal
readers get..
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
Wait. What about pornographers makes them "bad guys"???
Porn is fully legal. Assuming the models aren't forced to have sex (which would make it rape, not porn), and they're not, like, 5 years old (or 15, if you buy the whole "teens can't ever have sex without it being coersion" line), it's not unethical. How can you compare "porn pushers" to mobsters?
I used to work for a porn site, programming on their content and developing HTML and CSS. They're just ordinary people trying to make a living. Porno isn't wrong. For fuck's sake, what is with America's puritanical attitude towards sex anyhow? Hit a 16-year-old, nothing happens. Have consensual sex with a 16-year-old, go to jail and get branded a "sex offender", as if you're some kind of rapist. Show kids a building blowing up, that's okay. Show kids a nipple and OMGOMGOMG JESUS PROTECT THEIR EYES. Seriously, WTF!?
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
Exactly. Reading the summary left me scratching my head too. You've nailed the moral judgment excellently already, so I won't repeat that.
But I'll add another thought there: regardless of the moral judgment, exactly what is to learn from porn or gambling sites anyway?
No, seriously. Spammers, scammers, DDOS extortionists, etc, actually face some technical challenges. They need zero day exploits to maintain their army of zombie machines. They need to circumvent or disable protections. (See the many viruses or trojans that disable the major antiviruses and firewalls.) They need to dodge the law, at _least_ in that they need to transfer the ill gotten money abroad without leaving _too_ many obvious traces. Etc.
Those are real technical challenges. Antiviruses for example are getting so defensive against being disabled, that it's sometimes hard to fully uninstall them even as the legit owner of the machine.
You can learn something from that, and (in response to other posts) there _are_ legitimate uses for that knowledge too. E.g., whatever techniques they use to automate looking for buffer overflows, should be mandatory testing techniques for new software.
But porn and gambling sites? Gimme a break. I dare say most of the porn sites are actually just a plain old normal web site. There's nothing particularly high-tech about them, really. Just some thumbnails linking to a video or larger picture. In really "high tech" cases, they might open a popup via javascript for the page with the embedded movie. But that's about it.
Exactly what's to learn there.
Sure, a number of sites use porn as a bait to get one virused. But even then it helps to realize that that's not primarily a porn site, it's primarily a script-kiddie site and the porn is just the bait there. Just because the porn is the bait, doesn't make porn itself some high-tech black-hat thing.
To use a metaphor, there have been cases where people have been lured in a RL (non-internet, back-of-the-van kind) scam with such promises as a cheap second-hand laptop or whatever other cheap no-questions-asked good. Yet that doesn't make laptops themselves some evil bad-guy kind of scam. It's just the bait, the scam is a completely different half of that incident.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
It's like going to a party and getting so drunk you don't know where you'll be in the morning...or who will be able to have their way with you in the evening.
I'm sorry, but I'm an engineer and I don't understand this comparison. Could you please rephrase it?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
WTF? As Slashdotters are fond of saying, put on your tinfoil hat. If you buy into the "bread and circuses" idea (as it relates to television), you'll understand this. (Hey -- you may already realize it. I don't mean to insult your intelligence.)
Those in command must (above all else) keep the public frightened. TV violence is a good way to make that happen. When you consider that many also find it entertaining, all the better for "those in command." Pron is entertaining, yes, but it might cause some people to lose their edge (the one that makes them frightened, hard-working, and consumption-oriented).
... er... how do you turn on that "Google Ads"-Option with your post again?
Please tell me quick!
sig? Oh, that sig...
...for worst commercial website of the year!
I remember way back in the mid 1990s stumbling on "the web page from hell" joke site--it was full of blinking text and animated GIFs, all arranged in tables (I think they were nested 5 levels deep) in a hundred or so cells. It made a reasonable machine of the day (a P90 running ancient Netscape Navigator) cry in protest. In a tiny box in amongst all the glitz was "This is the actual article, brought to you by all or generous sponsors. Please read on for some really interest...CONTINUE".
Seriously, the useful-content-to-advertising-noise-ratio on CIO.COM is so absurdly low that it rivals that joke site without exaggeration. It is also a sad commentary on the state of the web when one complaint in the feedback is met with several "stop whining and just use the print link" comments. Firstly, it is called a "print link" not a "read article" link--you've already clicked the link to view the article! Second, stylesheets have made print buttons obsolete--every single graphical browser under current development today supports the use of stylesheets with different media types, such that just using the print function of the browser will produce proper hard-copy layout. It seems the average web user is now used to--and even expects--migrane-inducing, bandwidth-wasting, low-content sites.
That cruddy, advertising-overloaded layout on CIO.COM is one "innovation" from the online porno/gambling/spamming industry the net could really do without.
{snickergiggleteehee}
To that end, New Frontier is obsessive about metadata, watching every frame of every video it digitizes and recording as many attributes as it can.
Obsessively watching porn-- for Metadata tagging. That's they're excuse and they're sticking to it.
"Mobile brings immediate gratification. With the Internet, you have to wait until you get home."
Ew. I'm never taking the bus again.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
I received this email about a week ago. Can you say money laundering?
Dear [MY NAME]
I'm Olivia Myers, Manager of Royal Financial LTD. On site Monster.com i have found your resume and want to offer you the vacancy of "ePayment Manager".
Job description:
The major duty of the ePayment Manager is to process payments between our clients and our company via PayPal system. You will get 15 percent per transfer.
Salary: 500$-3500$ per month.
Benefits of this vacancy:
1. Flexible work schedule, work 3-5 hours per week.
2. Possibility of your career rising.
3. Home-based.
4. Ability to take unlimited vacation (without guaranteed salary).
Minimal requirements:
1. You must have the PayPal account.
2. At least 18 years old.
3. Internet and e-mail skills.
More information you can find on our site www.royal-finance-ldt.com. If you want to get this job please fill the form If you've got some questions about this vacancy please
read F.A.Q. and if can't find the answer to your question, address to our support.
Best regards
---
Olivia Myers manager@royal-finance-ldt.com
What'chu lookin' at Willis?
Crime pays.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Since it came up, in response to Caspian:
Is it unfair to claim that viewing pornography, especially regularly, will fundamentally alter a bloke's perceptions of what is normal and what is decidedly warped to do to/with a woman? Or to put it on a more everyday level, is it unfair to claim that promoting pornography as fine and healthy encourages a lifestyle of self-gratification that over time will diminish the value the individual (and thus the society) places on true selfless love, not just in a romantic context but across all personal relationships?
I'm against pornography for more reasons than this, but this alone is enough that I would prefer a society where the porn industry never pushed technology and we all still used Pentium MMXs, but at least husband's still knew how to *really* love their wives.
Freedom of speech is one thing, but I should be free not to listen too. Porn is becoming damn near inescapable these days. In the words of Switchfoot: "sex is currency, she sells cars, she sells magazines... suburban youth, hail your so-called liberty".
Censorship is the opposite of education. If neo-darwinism were defensible, people would not need to try and censor ID.
First of all, if you want to reply to someone then reply to them, don't start a new thread. Second, nobody is forcing you to watch porn, you are free not to listen/watch. And third, no porn does not "fundamentally alter a bloke's perceptions of what is normal and what is decidedly warped to do to/with a woman". I still know how to "*really* love" my wife despite having watched tons of porn since I was 12 or so. And somehow we manage to seperate fantasy from reality (you should try it!) and have normal sex, despite us watching the unrealistic sex depicted in porn. Just because you are too stupid to tell the difference between a movie and reality doesn't mean you need to be concerned that everyone else is as stupid as you.
I dunno, just ask your mother!
It's not narcissicism if it's true!
Most of the mentioned "bad guys" have a generally negative connotation to them. If you really want to get nitpicky, go look up bad or seedy in the dictionary and see how broadly you can define it.
Honestly, with some of the comments you'd think someone's livelihood was being threatened. As if there was a great disturbance in the pron, and a million voices suddenly cried out in terror, "ZOMG not my pron!1!11"
Its a good info dude. http://www.agileinfosystems.com/
SPAM: "the sender's name on this particular e-mail sent a shudder down his spine .."
.."
.."
...
.. They are attacking the vulnerability of people's brains, Sophos
PHISING: "The e-mail claimed in convincing detail that there was a problem
FAKE WEB SITES: [and] "urged customers to click on a link--to a phony website
DDOS ATTACKS: "Dougherty's website lay in a coma from a devastating distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that"
Well the root cause of the problem is the above so to fend off cybercriminals you would have to
01. Create an email infrastructure that provides end-to-end authentication and encryption.
02. Create a web identity infrastructure that provides end-to-end authentication and encryption.
03. Make a desktop computer that can't be compromised to be used in a DDoS attack, merely by clicking on an URL or opening an email attachment.
04. Design the upstream network infrastructure to mitigate against DDoS attacks.
Why are we still talking about all this in the middle of 2007. What are all those innovators and security experts doing to earn their salaries.
'These are not attacking any kind of vulnerability in the computer
davecb5620@gmail.com
Hey dude, most people dont even know that illegal porn sites for pedophiles etc....are bounced off compromised machines....some granmother somewhere hooked to the internet 24/7 not knowing anything about security probably has a site sitting in a hidden folder running on xitami server running in stealth mode..... I just hope that when she goes in front of a judge, that he believes she only emailed a few friends with that computer, cause to be 80 and going to jail for some hard time due to pornographic content might make here a target on the inside..... ...OOOPS!
Yup, those are the mails. When you reply, you get detailed information that you can expect money to trickle into your account which you're then supposed to forward.
Appearantly now PayPal is the new WU. Well, gotta check how that works now...
Thanks for the information.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This is probably the best coment I have read this year in /.
I can only add: People don't change. Old people die and they're replaced by other people with different values. That's the only way to evolve.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.