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Storm and the Future of Social Engineering

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the worming-around-under-my-skin dept.

Albert writes "Storm shows several key characteristics, some new and advanced. It uses cunning social engineering techniques — such as tying spam campaigns to a current event or site of interest — as well as a blend of email and the Web to spread. It is highly coordinated, yet decentralized — and with Storm using the latest generation of P2P technology, it cannot be disabled by simply 'cutting off its head.' In addition, Storm is self-propagating — once infected, computers send out massive amounts of Storm spam to keep recruiting new nodes."

3 of 77 comments (clear)

  1. How is this news? by Magada · · Score: 5, Informative

    The worm's been around for the better part of a year now and these features are in it from the beginning.

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    Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
  2. This is simply an advertisment by Silver+Sloth · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is just a puff piece for IronPort - nothing to see here, move along

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    init 11 - for when you need that edge.
  3. Re:Self created problem? by TrekkieGod · · Score: 4, Informative

    However, the GUI installation tool only allows for installation by default into /Library. It is possible to override this at the command line, but it's not possible to create an installer that gives the user the option of installing into ~/Library, or does so by default.

    I think there are a whole lot of things that Apple does wrong, but in this case, if you're trying to use the installer for something that doesn't need to write system-wide stuff, you're the one doing it wrong. The vast majority of applications don't use installers. You drag the thing to the applications folder, which doesn't ask you for your password (and the 'application' that "looks" like a single file is actually comprised of all the libraries it needs to run). Upon running the application, the application will then write stuff to your ~/Library folder.

    Now, my beef with Apple's installer is that there's no easy way to uninstall anything that was installed with an installer. With the other stuff, I can just drag the application from the Applications folder into the trash, but if it requires an installer, you're essentially left to track down all the files and deleting them manually.

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    Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.