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."

Comments

Slashdotted

[elh_inny]

Posting the info and having people slashdot the mentioned sites is not going to help them either :)

Re:More than just DDoS

[cpq]

user@my-box:~$ host aa419.org aa419.org has address 127.0.0.1 Actually this is the SMART thing to do. If they're attacking the hostname of the website, any smart admin would change the DNS record to lower the TTL to update, and update their address to 127.0.0.1. This way the botnet boxes end up attacking themselves. I've done it before. Then once the attack is over you update your A name record to the actual IP.

Re:How do you explain this to the average joe?

[garompeta]

You are underestimating how valuable and powerful distributed computing is, my friend.
It has been used as a distributed MD5 crackers, collisions in SHA-1, and search for extraterrestrial life... (eer... yeah)
Having a gigantic botnet of at least 100,000 computers to unimaginable millions of infected computers that we'll probably ignoring or we are unable to detect, this gives a tremendous asset to a malicious hacker.

It is a very fat milking cow:

1) Crack passwords that it is not considered crackeable in a reasonable amount of time
2) Botnets to attack whoever he wants (at a reasonable price or for a reasonable cause)
3) Millions of Passwords, logins accounts, paypal, amazon, credit card, identity, whatever, stolen.
4) Millions of proxies to hop on and chain hiding the source of a real meticulous attack. 5) Millions of illegal distributed server to host for illegal materials (eg: virii, worms, child pornography)

Etc...