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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)."
Who believes that for a second?
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.
Is this really a computer virus? Malware sure, virus, no. It's like that program that would show you the drink holder (I think coke, sorry can't find a link) and open your cdrom drive. Only this adds a reg entry or puts something in the startup folder that and does a ExitWindowsEx call.
I guess that's all it takes to be "l33t" these days...
Mr. Universe: "They can't stop the signal, Mal. They can never stop the signal."
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!!!!
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?