Slashdot Mirror
Anti-Scammers Become Storm Botnet Victims
capnkr writes "It looks like the efforts of the anti-scammers at sites like 419eater, Scamwarners, Artists Against 419, and possibly others have become the target of the Storm botnet.
Spamnation has a post about it, and as of this writing none of the above listed sites are responding. Spamnation reports that CastleCops and other anti-spam forums are being DDoSed as well. Sounds like a massive, concerted effort against the folks who are fighting the good fight.
Although I hate it for the owners and admins of the above sites, I think it shows without a doubt that their efforts to 'get back' at the scammers are working."
Posting the info and having people slashdot the mentioned sites is not going to help them either :)
I screwed with a craigslist scammer this week. It was sorta fun.
m l
:)
http://digitalsushi.com/goraku/fakecheck/story.ht
Getting him to mail a check made out to "Pownd Uholot" was entertaining.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
What would this accomplish? The lusers have to be hit hard to start to care about what sort of malware resides on their machines. I would rather see a solution where someone exploits a hole in the Storm control implementation and distributes a disk shredding update to all nodes.
50M dead HDDs would be fun in the oldschool spirit and at the same time would generate enough of fuss for people to start actually caring about security.
Is there a scanner and fix available? It does require executing an email attachment, right?
It really shouldn't be called a worm unless it can worm its way in without social engineering...
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
I recall reading a quite interesting article on this topic a while ago while doing research for a university seminar I had to hold.
The big crux is that the "worm" needs to show negative behaviour, i.e. exploit it's host bandwith and CPU cycles, at least for a while, to gain sufficient impact to "infect & patch" vulnerable machines. It would turn into a battle of the worms, where "grey" worms attempt to infect as many machines as possible, plug the security holes, seek new machines to "infect and patch" and then, after a while, self-delete themselves - while the "black" worms, attempt almost the same, only that they do not self-delete but instead continue to exploit their host. Most machines that become victims of rootkits or worms are actually patched up once infected, to avoid losing the machine to competing malware.
+++ MELON MELON MELON +++ Out of Cheese Error +++ redo from start +++
my password really is 'stinkypants'
There was a great disturbance in the force, it was if 50 million zombies all died as one. Then suddenly they returned in their pristine and un-patched state, and then suddenly update.windows.com went super-nova and imploded into a black hole.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I told my oldest son about this botnet yesterday, mentioning that with between 2 million and 20 million CPU's working at any one time, and even that larger figure likely representing only a fraction of the botnet's total capacity, it collectively represented the most powerful supercomputer ever built... and it was effectively under the control of a small group of people with criminal intent - the author, or authors, of the worm. My son responded to me with a great deal of scepticism, first saying that none of these security experts which have made this analysis have any way to estimate what sort of computing power military organizations might have, so saying that it represented the most powerful supercomputer ever was actually a completely meaningless claim, and also, he proclaimed that the story was most probably just hype and over exaggerated. He said that the claim of the most powerful supercomputer ever being controlled by criminals was simply too much to be believable, like the headlines one might see on the front page of the Weekly World News tabloid. He also said that it was ludicrous to see how sending people "penis extension ads" (which is about all he figures a botnet can do) can actually seriously harm anything or anyone.
So this got me to wondering... how much of this actually _is_ something that is of any real concern, and if it really is, how could it be explained to people in such a way that it's not going to sound like some claim from a conspiracy theorist?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Someone already did this to counter the Blaster worm. See Welchia. The problem with this one though is that it was flooding networks with ICMP pings, causing more network outages than the Blaster worm it was designed to fight.
Oh please god.... no....
Think of what you're saying! The same group of people who color-code our paranoia, who decide that waterbottles are dangerous, and who advise us to purchase duct tape... you want to turn to them for help securing the Internet? Do you have any idea how painful that would be?
No -- the responsibility here lies with the users and (to some extent) the carriers. If the user's machines are infected, disconnect them. If the carriers detect a large, coordinated traffic pattern, investigate -- and if it's a DDOS attack, block it at the firewall level (before the traffic leaves your network segments.)
The real litigious bastards...
This article is a good place to start.
You could also introduce him to the theory behind Bittorrent, which is a good demonstration of how many computers each doing a small task, given modest bandwidth, can add up to massive distribution and publication power in short order.
Now, what if some distributed network decided to siphon a gig of illegal or embarrassing materials onto a compromised target machine. Perhaps a politician that is voting the wrong way?
Then ask him, not if the entire banking industry is safe, but if an individual's information (SHA hash collision or private key, but that's not "average Joe" speak) could be subject to a distributed brute force attack.
With the growing power of computers making tiny pieces of malware harder and harder to notice (that 1% of processor time is more and more powerful), and malware being able to literally hide files from the user until such time that it chooses to reveal them, it seems like it's only a matter of time before someone with a large enough botnet, and enough imagination, could start attacking individuals and/or siphoning off their money. How you do this is not something I care to discuss, but the black hats (both the actual criminals and the security experts, as an exercise) already have ideas and are working on it. That's why you'll see them periodically calling for stronger encryption (more bits in the keys). If there was no possible threat, they wouldn't be creating and suggesting longer keys. Rootkits would not be a concern, if files hidden from the user were always benign (most are).
But all it takes is the wrong person to have the right idea, a breakthrough that changes the assumptions, especially in cryptography. Show him the movie "Sneakers" if you want to fuel some imagination regarding that. It's crap, but it's also fun and sizes the problem for the average Joe. Assuming that only ethical people work in cryptography is somewhat naive. Assuming that unethical people are not watching the progress of ethical individuals in the field is stupid.
There's nothing to say such solutions and attacks haven't occurred already, but it seems, as your son suggests, unlikely. You can bet if a criminal has figured it out, a little bit of money siphoned off here and there would be almost impossible to detect, especially in an environment where people are unwilling to believe it's even possible. Believe me, if the idea has hit Hollywood, it's old hat. That's exactly how such a criminal would proceed if they had found a way to leverage such distributed computing applications. They would target a distributed network of accounts, one by one, in a way that looked like banking errors (which are numerous and automatically corrected by the bank) and slowly siphon money from the banking industry itself, through compromised individual accounts. No individual would suffer, because of correction processes in the banks, the world's capital reserves would.
Then ask what that money could buy in terms of influence, weapons, elections?
Any compromised machine is a liability to its user. Botnets are a menace to society, and we're lucky all they're (hopefully) being used for is "penis enlargement" ads and DDoS attacks. That's barely scraping the surface of their potential.
If he wants to go on believing that his safety and security are a given, without any effort on his own part, there's little you can do, but anyone with any imagination, who is not in flat out denial, can demonstrate that distributed computing applications have a great deal of power, and that basic security is everyone's concern. It is definitely not good that these ne
Probably because claims to the effect of "all blank are filthy scammers and spammers" are generally considered to be flamebait? Add to that the whole notion of "our cyberspace" and a completely unrealistic proposal (just how do you prevent an entire country from connecting to the internet, anyway?). Yeah, it's flamebait.