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Largest Hacking Scam in Canadian History
vieux schnock writes "Police raided several homes across Quebec on Wednesday and arrested 16 people in their investigation, which they say uncovered the largest hacking scam in Canadian history. (...) The hackers collaborated online to attack and take control of as many as one million computers around the world that were not equipped with anti-virus software or firewalls."
It doesn't even really matter at this point. Let's be honest... the average computer user doesn't know the difference between U2-Somesong.mp3 and U2-SomeSong.exe. It doesn't take much to write an application that would be able to run in a restricted user account... just connect outbound on port 80 for coordination, and for payload delivery. The code would be simple enough that you could change the binary significantly enough that the fingerprinting that virus scanners use are practically worthless.
That doesn't even address the vector of replacing the setup.exe (or equivalent) on, say, an Office 2003 cd posted on thepiratebay. Obviously, the install has to run as admin, so you pretty much know, you are a shoe in for a compromised machine for anyone who tries to install it. And again, it would be such a trivial, simple application, that you could change the attacking binary pretty much at will.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
From the ages of 17-26.
Wouldn't you say the RCMP is just hunting down script kiddies?