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CastleCops.com Hit With Reputation-Based Attacks
An anonymous reader writes "The all-volunteer based online fraud fighting group CastleCops.com is currently the target of ongoing reputation-based attacks in which criminals use phished PayPal accounts to donate thousands of dollars to CastleCops from dozens of victims. This attack appears to be in response to a recent series of failed denial-of-service attacks against the CastleCops, Web site. From the story: 'A few donations were for as little as $1, while other fake donations ranged as high as $2,800. To the victims of the stolen PayPal accounts, it looks as if CastleCops is the one stealing their money, when in reality, it's the attackers. Also, the fraudulent activity seeks to ruin their relationship with PayPal.' In a comment left on Washingtonpost.com's Security Fix blog, CastleCops co-founder Paul Laudanksi says while the group's site remains under a heavy DDoS attack, it is currently down due to a hardware failure, not the attack itself."
"CastleCops needs to start treating what they are doing more like a business and less like a hobby."
Thank you for your very deep and wonderful insight!
Obviously you have found the core of all their problems was that they obviously don't take what they are doing seriously, and because of that, the groups they are fighting against use sneaky tactics through third party companies to enact harm upon them.
Because that makes sense and is something they obviously could have stopped if they had only "treated it more like a business", whatever that means. No one knows, because you didn't even elaborate.
[/sarcasm]
You never realize how much manually made unmanaged "linked" lists suck, till you have src.link.link.link.link...
With CastleCops.com as a honeypot, ISPs could be contacted to the origin of the DDoS attacks, PayPal could do some investigating of their own as to the IP origins of donations and do something about this stuff.
Fer Bob's sakes, this isn't 2001 anymore, when are these companies and perhaps goverment going to make some strides in shutting down bots and zombies?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
How did we arrive at such a completely fucked-up state of affairs, where organized gangs from Russia control what is (arguably) the most powerful supercomputer in existence? How is it that cyber-criminals are able to act with such total impunity? Am I the only person who doesn't understand how this is being ignored amid all the noise about "the war on terror"?
In Soviet Russia, phishers send you money..
Seriously. Is decency at such a low ebb that people have to stoop to attacking victim services and defense organizations? Seriously. Maybe if these people put half the time and energy they did into stealing they could actually get a real job and sleep well for a change instead of ripping people off all the time.
:-)
And while they're at it, they could stop sporging sci.crypt and other groups. That'd be nice.
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
At least your joe-job sounded PG-13. When crypto trolls in sci.crypt wanted me off the scene they posted child porn with my home address and phone number (neither kept secret, but obviously I didn't want them tied to that). After the initial wave of kiddie porn, they decided to re-post my posts in thousands of groups. When my 2nd book was coming out they re-posted a single post I wrote about the book (sans URL) and included the URL. Net result, lots of death threats, spam, hate mail, and low reviews on Amazon from people who have never read the book.
The sad thing is, if someone really wants to cause hell for another it's not all that hard. 99% of net users are ignorant to how trustworthy things like a "from" address are. In fact, we had to joe-job [privately] one irate poster who kept assuming joe-jobs were impossible with email. So my brother and I sent him emails with his name and address on them. (this was all in private, not public). In the end he told us to leave him alone (and we did) and he never really conceded the point.
People are dumb. This just proves they're also mean.
Which is why I study music instead now. The Internet is just too much of a waste.
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
How about this: Paypal needs to start treating their customer service situation more like a business and less like a hobby.
This game will waste your life. Don't clicky!
You've been spending too much time on slashdot.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Agreed -- to a point. Phishing is like the Internet equivalent of mugging, in that your money is taken involuntarily, but the fact is, you click the link that enables the phisher to get your cash. People have to be accountable for their own actions. I would give them full refunds, but then if I was PayPal I would flag their accounts and scrutinize every transaction from there on out for at least a year to make sure they didn't repeat the mistake. Maybe after their payments continue to be delayed by the extra processing, the users will think twice before clicking any link. And if they don't, and get bagged again, automatically shut down their account.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Which just goes to show what psychologists have known for years: the mob is fickle and easily incited. All you have to do is chant "child porn" and point a finger and the dogs are all over you. What hurts with something like that is that information on the Internet has permanence unlike anything else, which mans even if you clear up a misconception, misunderstanding, or outright fraud, the original information continues to exist and people will still believe. To paraphrase, "a lie repeated often enough starts to sound like the truth."
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
I don't know the statistics, but it must make up a shit load of traffic.
Oh, come on. You just pulled that statistic out of your ass.