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Security Researcher Chases Virus Maker Off the Net
An anonymous reader writes "There is a great writeup over on CNET covering the pursuit of a virus writer who created a fake Grand Theft Auto game, crippling PCs by causing them to endlessly reboot. Despite the police apparently not being very interested, a security researcher pursued his man anyway, culminating in a teary eyed 'I'm leaving the internet' post from the virus writer himself. Awesome stuff, and one in the eye for the bad guys (for once)."
They just send someone to do the hit on the virus writer.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Who believes that for a second?
Seriously though, I can't imagine just "leaving the internet," for any reason whatsoever.
As any long-time denizen of BBSes or MUDs can tell you, every time someone posts that they are leaving it is always legit, and they never, ever come back.
"Hahaha. Cry some more!"
makin-the-bad-guy-cry Chuck-D-luvin sooper-security overlords!
-WtC
Creator of RPerl, Scouter, Juggler, Mormon, Perl Monger, Serial Entrepreneur, Aspiring Astrophysicist, Community Organiz
...Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
Churchill
This would make a great sequel to 'Catch me If you Can'.
This sig left intentionally blank.
No, this happens. Posting as an AC because I know some a neurotic offtopic mod nazi won't be smart enough to realize that this is a reply, not an original post.
This isnt a virus, first off. It was a lame trojan. Like all others, cut-n-pasted by some 13 year old script kiddie, I mean just read the story and tell me it could be any other way.
So some blowhard self-important jackass "security researcher" harassed a little kid and made him cry.
What a fucking loser.
The REAL virus writers/blackhats, the ones infiltrating multi-billion dollar corps, are working for the russian mob.
Go after them, I double dog dare you.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Now I have slashdot and I'm right back where I started, except there aren't a lot of easy slashdot girls... hmmm...
"Thank you for using Stop-n-Drop, America's favorite suicide booth since 2008"
Police have rules to follow. They can't approach someone and force them to speak based on instinct or shallow suspicious. I wonder how many innocents were scrutinized or accused by "security researchers".
From the articles linked, it appears to be nothing more than a GameMaker "game" which adds registry entries which cause shutdown.exe and logoff.exe to be called when you log in.
In fact, if this was considered malware... perhaps marginally, although it has no serious effects... it isn't a virus because it doesn't replicate itself and spread. The guy who wrote it is obviously a wannabe hacker... you know, the kind who use pre-built tools without a clue how they work. Except this guy couldn't even find tools so he used a game creation system. Lame.
"...history may help investigators eventually identify the perpetrator" Misleading! If law enforcement saw 54 PCs with a bogus script that caused constant reboots as a threat they would have caught YoGangsta50 very fast through issuance of 2 subpoenas. 1 would have been to recover the IP address logged from the Youtube upload and the other would have been subsequent to the first in order to reveal the account information of the ISP that owns the revealed IP address. Seeing as YoGangsta50 has no real leet haxing skillz by being so blatently obvious in his poor attempt of a prank labeled crime, they probably took pity on him. I bet Edmond Locard feels real good about himself and the 54 computers he may have helped to save.
You are as stupid as he.
"wahhh you are mean, im leaving" , ya right.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
When he comes back he will be welcomed with open arms - and a rock in each hand.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
dude; nailing BBS chicks is nothing to brag about...
Godwin!
I have a hard time believing that any "security researcher" would keep calling the application in question a "virus".
It sounds to me like the story is about *two* wannabes, not just one.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
I'm leaving Slashdot forever. You'll never see Anonymous Coward post here again.
It depends. There was a BBS I used to use in the mid-80s in my area. Every once in a while, the sysop's sister would jump on while I was logged in and we'd talk for a few minutes. I was always really careful because I figured it might just be the sysop pretending to be his sister. At any rate, I figured that if it really _was_ his sister, she was probably a real dog (yes, a somewhat chauvinistic thought, but few girls back then had any interest whatsoever in computers, and those that did were almost guaranteed to be as homely as they come). Some months after I started using the BBS, I had a reason to go visit the sysop at his house (I forget why -- sharing pd software or something). While I was there, I met his sister, and I thought I was going to lose consciousness. She was drop-dead gorgeous -- one of the most attractive girls I've ever seen. Just going on a single date with her would have granted bragging rights, but there was absolutely no chance for me; I couldn't even form a complete sentence in her presence.
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
Oh my head! I'll never drink again.
He was in the same CS clan as me way back in Historical Times and used to call me up and ask me to tell him how to "hack stuff". I didn't tell him much of anything, sounds like he learned whatever he wanted to learn though :-) But yeah, John from Hartford, different nick at the time, but right age bracket, same interest in breaking things that aren't his to break. Nice. Hopefully this will straighten him out. At least he didn't get in any actual trouble.
I like music
This story reads basically that some over zealous security researcher chased an incompetent malware script kiddie around for an app that compromised maybe 50 people. As far as accomplishment goes, this ranks up there with shooting fish in a barrel and apparently proves he can do Google searches.
I'm glad that there is a minimum damage level before law enforcement gets involved because this would be a tremendous waste of tax payer dollars to go after and then, given how totally out of whack the laws are in regards to this kind of thing because of Luddite terror of people with technical ability, we'd probably have to end up paying this moron's housing for five years and create another person with a criminal record who cannot get employed and thus gets even more benefits at our expense.
And at the end of the day, it proves nothing. From a technical standpoint, someone could easily create an false identity like this, even the sign off part. The whole investigation trail is based off string comparisons. Whether it is "John" in Philadelphia or a really smart dog in Detroit, who knows?
I LEFT THE INTERNET!!!!
Years ago, we the community for the freeware music-creation software buzz (buzzmachines.com) did something similar with a troll who kept abusing our messageboard. Called himself Dirty Harry, kept trying to get a reaction by telling us how Reason (commercial music-creation software) was so much better.
Our community has a lot of geeks. Some tried to hack his machine. But what really shut him up was when we traced him, using the same techniques as the guy in TFA, to a car dealership in the UK. Someone posted his work phone number and magically the abuse stopped.
This must've been fun to watch. When I was in college I made a recursive batch file be called at boot on all PCs before a crappy class. Interestingly enough, most people couldn't fix it, despite being in 2nd year of Computer Science. Okay, that was lame. I'll be taking my leave now :)
I remember Joanie (aka "kitten"), too. She was the exception to the rule... But she was a neurotic date. Alas, then we all were.
Oh, ok. Thanks :)
As our God used to say, "you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave"
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
In my teenaged years I got randomly chatted by the sysop's daughter on a local C-64 BBS on a variety of occasions. Even began setting up "I'm gonna log in at midnight, so chat me then." Yeah, sounds like it belong in an alt.* newsgroup, etc.
I for one welcome our script kiddie hacker overlords. May their attacks be merciless and plentiful. J/K
On the serious note, I'm sick of hearing about "script kiddies"? How are these people sure that these are indeed 13 year old children using toolz. The last time I checked it was very difficult for me to procure any nasty tools to even do half of the stuff that I hear that script kiddies are doing. Really, I'm not joking here. It's not like I'm an idiot or anything... Maybe it's because I'm 27 and I'm out of the loop. THE LAST TIME I CHECKED 13 YEAR OLDS COULD NOT USE A COMPUTER BETTER THAN ME! I write perl, PHP, ASP, JSP and python scripts with the best of them. You show me a snot nosed brat that can write "better" object oriented code and I'll conceed that maybe I either don't know where to look for toolz or that maybe I'm just not the computer geek that I thought I was. It's now obvious that I write programs for websites and to many of my elders I'm not a "real" programmer either. I think the bar must be set for script kiddies and the age should be upped to 27.
On the side, here's an acutally interesting article by Mr. Gibson of Gibson Research Corporation and his encounters with a script kiddie.
http://www.grc.com/dos/grcdos.htm
The article I mentioned is actually quite awesome because Mr. Gibson actually takes the script kiddie down a notch and is able to defend himself through filters on his cisco router. Read the article, we need more programmers like this.
I believe him 110%
-signed YoGansta51
it's pretty fucking lame that the dev lost the source code to buzzmachines.
Shoulda open-sourced it. Prick.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I doesn't take a genius to block an ICMP attack with a Cisco or anything else. Why quench wasn't already enabled on it is another WTF.
Then he goes on to bitch about raw sockets in Windows and why ISPs should be responsible for their user's actions. What fucking planet does this guy live on?
In short, eat a dick.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Yeah, right.
Why not let the punishment fit the crime? They give you a data-scrambling virus, dose them up with mercury. They give you a virus that infects others, we give them herpes. Etc, etc...
So what does Bill Gates get? While some of his data scrambling has been accidental, much is intentional. The upgrade treadmill alone has cost more than any virus or trojan and it hits those who try hardest! Sabotage of other company's software has also cost millions of man hours. The problem with your method of punishment is that it must just suck to be Bill Gates. How can you get any crazier than to sit around dreaming of global software domination, smear campaigns and other strangeness M$ gets up to at his command?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
If you're going to be a little bitch about getting modded down, don't bother posting, whore. Thank you and God bless.
So let me get this straight. Guy takes a poke at computer nerds by suggesting that computer nerds only get ugly women. And your comeback is, in essence, "Dude no way, I totally saw a cute girl once when I was 16!" Not exactly what I call a biting rejoinder...
you're making the assumption that they were girls...
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
Uh, actually, I'm old and a bit slow, so it took me about 2-seconds to come to the conclusion that this story "isn't even wrong"....
This is just lame. The researcher narrowed it down to a black person in Hartford, Connecticut between the ages of 16-19. Oh yeah, he likes the Boondock Saints and his name may be John. Do you know how many people that could be? There are 125,000 people in Hartford and nearly 40% are black. That's 50,000 people. Let's say roughly 25,000 are male. So now you have to narrow that down to ages 16-19 which is probably at least a couple thousand. Now you're looking for someone among thousands who's name may be John and who likes the Boondock Saints. Considering people are getting shot and robbed on the street in Hartford I think the police have a little more to worry about than someone who made a piece of software that makes you computer reboot continuously.
Time makes more converts than reason
From a comment on the security blog:
...yeah, that sounds exactly like a "prank". I guess he did all of that stuff accidentally.
"he released numerous variants of these infections, bundling them with fake games (complete with pointless install screens) and programs using a distribution method based around socially engineering people via blogs, forums and video sharing sites such as youtube, and it took considerable time and effort to have all the rogue accounts shut down - Google had to intervene directly. He also created a website designed to harvest IP addresses (in fact, he asks you to fill your IP address in as your password) to spam messages across Myspace / forums (in the form of image spam whose download location included the words "download bait", nice touch). Those messages would then redirect you to rogue antispyware installs, which have a history of being involved in more malicious bundles - depending on the product or products installed, more malware files could be downloaded onto the PC. It's entirely possible given the evidence on display that he was signed up to one of these affiliate deals and was trying to make some money via these hijacks.
However you look at it, he had a sophisticated distribution network of rogue files spanning a range of locations from video sharing sites to blogs to forums to Myspace, with a collection of free web hosts inbetween. Leaving his contact information all over the place was definitely stupid, but he knew exactly what he was doing in terms of how to go about infecting people."
This is exactly the right approach to dealing with nuisances. When someone behaves in a childish manner, the best way to change their behavior is to make them understand that their actions can cause them more grief than they are willing to accept. It isn't about the damage they do, it is about the nuisance they cause. That said, there seems to be some bad analogies being used here.
This isn't like a kid slashing tires, this is like a kid who convinced you to slash your own tires. Even if he hands you his pocket knife, even if he tells you it will make your car faster, if you slash your own tires then the kid causing the nuisance only shares the blame with you.
The distinction here is that the "virus" writers didn't actually damage anyone's machines directly, they just convinced people to do something stupid (downloading and installing software from an unknown source is stupid.) I have told people that Alt+F4 would fix their problems before, always as a joke, but if they were stupid enough to believe me then they should consider it a cheap education.
Still nags this lingering guilt, maybe I need to read BOFH again.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
Did anyone read the fucking blog? That was the biggest load of sarcasm I think I've ever read. To bad it wasn't blatant
crap.
What this guy should have done, was emailed this information to the principal of every school in Hartfort, Connecticut, as well as all the newspapers. He would have found the location of this guy, ruined the guys repuation and life. Then he should have litigated and screwed him for life...
I can't find any plausible excuse for slashing someone's tires, putting sugar in their gas tank, or putting glue in their ignition, or some of the other things that were mentioned in this thread.
I don't consider myself to be a malicious person, in general, but I have vandalized the cars of a couple of pendejos who certainly deserved what they got.
Case A: I was with my bike in a downtown area, waiting for a bus, when some jerk in an SUV drove up on the sidewalk and about hit me. This in an area where pedestrians and cyclists really needed the sidewalk to avoid being run over, and he completely blocked the path. Then he parked there and went into a local restaurant. So I slashed one of his tires. Penalty for breaking the law and almost hitting me with his car. Four tires would have been excessive--one tire would allow him to suffer the embarrassment of changing a tire while parked illegally on the sidewalk without completely crippling his car.
Case B: While living in an area with extremely limited parking, across the street from a frat house (unfortunately), I encountered a car parked in one of the spaces reserved for my residence. Left a note the first time asking them not to park in that space. Second time, I threw a cup of methylene chloride on their roof. The paint just bubbled up and separated from the metal. They had fair warning and decided to disregard.
Case C: Had trouble parking in a full lot--because some guy in a brand new pickup truck had parked diagonally, taking two spaces (completely intentionally, to avoid dings). So I keyed the hell out of his door. If everyone would key cars parked diagonally in two spaces, maybe it would stop happening.
I don't claim that these acts were the most mature things to do, but every one of the "victims" deserved at the least a slap in the face, and that wasn't a viable option for me. Throwing paint remover on that one car was the most damaging, in monetary value, and I almost felt bad about doing it, except I had already tried the "civilized" route first to no avail.