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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."
Blame Canada! ... eh?
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Are you serious? There are hundreds of millions of PCs in the world (billions?), and the vast majority of them aren't properly secured. Also the vast majority of them have 10 smiley toolbars and take 45 minutes to boot.
Nah, nothing so covert. Its simply that, "as many as", sounds a lot better than, "three computers we know about, but we really have no clue" or "we found 5 million deposited in their bank accounts in the last month, but the accounts have been open for nine months, so who knows how much money they could have collected previously".
Alternatively they probably have a pretty good idea of the ranges involved, but hey, high numbers make a better press release.
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It's 16 Canadian people, or 14 Americans... it's just the exchange rate.
From the ages of 17-26.
Wouldn't you say the RCMP is just hunting down script kiddies?
I'd assume you're always authorized to use your own computer.
Then again, in today's climate, maybe not...
These arrests were in Quebec. What they are not telling us is that the arrests were REALLY for not hacking into the boxes using both official languages.
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As with a lot of our other trash, we simply shipped Celine Dion to America. Now she's your problem, enjoy.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
There are no safe file types. All files can be viewed as programs meant to run in a specialized virtual machine (the program which is used to open them). For example, a PNG file is a program which, when run, will compute an array of bytes (the image pixels). The same goes to PDF. In this view, since all files are programs, it is in principle possible that any of them could contain code which can result in unexpected behavior of the virtual machine executing them.
Of course some file types are easier to compromize than others, either due to sheer complexity or ambiguity of the specification or because they are Turing complete. However, it is impossible to guarantee that every viewer for any file type is free of defects. Anyone still remember ANSI codes for DOS, which could be embedded to text to change color but also to set macros to keyboard keys when the file was viewed ? And of course SQL injection attacks are based on formatting a text string so it will cause unexpected results, not to mention causing a buffer overflow with an overlong string.
I repeat: there are no safe file types. They all have a potential to contain malicious code, because there is no such thing as data which is not also a program. From a certain point of view, GIMP is simply a very specialized compiler...
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.