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The World's Biggest Botnets
ancientribe writes "There's a new peer-to-peer based botnet emerging that could blow the notorious Storm away in size and sophistication, according to researchers, and it's a direct result of how Storm has changed the botnet game, with more powerful and wily botnets on the horizon. This article provides a peek at the 'new Storm' and reveals the three biggest botnets in the world (including Storm) — and what makes them tick and what they are after."
Imagine if somebody did this but donated cpu time to distributed computing projects like that one on cancer research. Force philanthropy would be rather strange and still illegal, but at least slightly more noble in a Robin Hood sort of way.
Probably because it's not the heart of all these problems. The heart of all these problems is that a billion security-unaware people operate computers that are connected to the internet.
Do you honestly think everyone switching to a different OS would solve the problem?
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Probably because it's not the heart of all these problems. The heart of all these problems is that a billion security-unaware people operate computers that are connected to the internet.
No, the heart of the problem is that windows, despite what M$ claims, was not be designed for those people and as a result those people make mistakes.
Software is soft, it can be anything we want it to be, and assholes who claim that "software can't do software related things" are lying through their teeth.
If thirty odd years ago windows had been designed responsibly we wouldn't have the mess that we have now. Amongst many other things when connected to the net they deliberately confused static data with executables and deliberately ran all programs as administrator. Things that mainframe OS' and Unix had understood and solved decades before. I can remember the very first time I saw a web page with an executable and thinking "you stupid fucking idiots". The ramifications were obvious right from the start; M$ just chose to ignore them.
The marketing parasites, and their patsies, who to this day continue to claim that windows was not a large part of the problem are lying arseholes. M$ is slowly improving their security but they still have a long, long way to go with a culture that still tries to test for security rather than building for it. And yes, despite what some idiots claim, security and user friendliness are not mutually contradictory. In fact they are more complimentary than contradictory with well built security systems helping users to make good choices for their own safety as well as everybody else's.
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Flash = blink tag = incompetent web designer.
No, smart people who know plenty about security punish all of us and use the clueless as their weapons. Your statement is like blaming the bullet for a murder instead of the killer. Without a functioning mind building these botnets, it wouldn't matter to us how stupid the rest of humanity is.
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
The sophistication of this Storm "application" is much more indicative of a mature elder programmer, who probably has read the complete cypherpunks archives. We talked about stuff like this long ago. Compare to things like the Morris worm, the two Manila children, etc. Those were intense, but brief due to coding errors and the like.
Bah. No, these people are not children and they do know what they're doing.
"internet licenses" have been discussed ad nauseum, and fact always arises that any such implementation would simply be elitist and exclusionary.
Basically, an internet license is a bunch of computer guys telling the rest of the world that the internet is an infrastructure made for the geeks, by the geeks, and of the geeks. If you really want to join the club you can take a test so we can determine if you're suitable, but otherwise, you're unfit to participate.
Look, you're not going to kill anyone being a bumbling participant on the internet, they way you might in a car or with a gun. Yes, it is possible that you unwittingly might cause some economic impact to someone, but is that a flaw of the user or the system? I submit a banking system that lets an ignorant user leak his personal information which can then be used to ruin their credit is broken. I further submit that a system that lets a zombie computer join thousands of other computers in a criminal enterprise is broken.
The problem doesn't just exist between the keyboard and chair, but also in the policies, protocols, and systems that allow a new or ignorant user to fail so spectacularly.
We should be striving to increase internet penetration to the young, the old, and the impoverished, not locking out those who can't understand our poorly built toys.