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Tech Lessons From the Bad Guys

Posted by kdawson on from the cio-to-the-mob-boss dept.

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."

8 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. Accidental pornographers? by eviloverlordx · · Score: 5, Funny

    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'.
    1. Re:Accidental pornographers? by twistedsymphony · · Score: 5, Interesting
      It was very interesting, while I knew that the porn industry was fairly in-tune with technology the article left me with the impression that they drive tech advances more then we realize... The one bit on open source software really caught my eye:

      Another red light best practice is to look for vendors that use open source. Since sites are open 24/7 (late-night hours are extremely profitable on the red light Web), "if we ever run into critical issues we need them solved now, not two hours from now," says Bodog's Ayre, who has learned that if he wants his people to be able to fix something, they need to have access to the source code. "We absolutely could not get a couple of our vendors to address an issue that was crippling us," says Ayre. "Under peak loads, the entire site became nonresponsive. We had no choice but to decompile the systems in question and fix the problem ourselves. This was probably one of the biggest drivers pushing us to adopt open-source solutions for our most critical systems."
      Probably one of the best arguments for a corporate adoption of open source software I've ever heard. I know, at least at my company, we're in constant struggle with our software vendors to fix bugs that are critical to us but maybe not critical to their other clients. This is particularly frustrating when we have the knowledge necessary to fix the problem ourselves... just no access to the source.
      --
      Collector's Edition
  2. here's another tip: the print link by smitty97 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  3. I'm shocked.... by 8127972 · · Score: 5, Funny

    .... 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.
  4. Value judgment error by Red+Flayer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  5. Wanted: Linux systems administrator. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting
    For those of you wondering about the pr0n stuff.

    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.

  6. Here's how it's done by Opportunist · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  7. Re:Hard to Feel Pity... by Opportunist · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I've been preaching that for years and the usual response was "you can't require people to study computer science before you allow them on the 'net".

    All I want is people to take responsibility for their actions. When I hand my car keys to a person I don't know and he uses the car for ill, I get sued. When I let a stranger into my house and he knocks me out and robs everything in sight, my insurance would laugh at me. When you note your secret number on the back side of your ATM card, your bank won't cover the loss.

    Just in the computer area, everyone's free to be as careless and irresponsible as he wants to be. It does NOT take a lot of brain power to know that offers that are too good to be true usually are. It doesn't require a lot of computer knowledge to NOT click on an attachment coming from someone identifying himself as "lawyer" (literally "lawyer", not some name). And it for sure does not require a lot of tech study to install some kind of antivirus tools.

    Don't get me wrong. I would not require an average user to hack his windows box to tighten security to the maximum. But why is it still asking too much if I ask people to

    - Use a router and disallow incoming syncs (most routers do that by default, so the "it's too technical" argument doesn't count).
    - Enable Auto-Update on your Windows box (most Linux distributions can that now, too).
    - Install some Anti-Virus tools
    - Keep the brain turned on when opening mails and unknown software.

    What's so problematic and impossible to do about this?

    It's certainly not a 100% secure solution. Granted. But it is "good enough". Just like nobody requires you to have iron bars in front of your windows and steel bolts in your high security door, I wouldn't require people to have 100% "hack proof" boxes. There's no such thing as an unhackable box as soon as it has some kind of connection to another box that can be used by a malicious user (i.e. the standard setup for a box connected to the internet). But at the very least this would thwart almost 100% of the standard trojans currently in circulation.

    What's so impossible about it?

    --
    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.