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McColo Briefly Returns, Hands Off Botnet Control
A week ago we discussed the takedown of McColo (and the morality of that action). McColo was reportedly the source of anywhere from 50% to 75% of the world's spam. On Saturday the malware network briefly returned to life in order to hand over command and control channels to a Russian network. "The rogue network provider regained connectivity for about 12 hours on Saturday by making use of a backup arrangement it had with Swedish internet service provider TeliaSonera. During that time, McColo was observed pushing as much as 15MB of data per second to servers located in Russia, according to ... Trend Micro. The brief resurrection allowed miscreants who rely on McColo to update a portion of the massive botnets they use to push spam and malware. Researchers from FireEye saw PCs infected by the Rustock botnet being updated so they'd report to a new server located at abilena.podolsk-mo.ru for instructions. That means the sharp drop in spam levels reported immediately after McColo's demise isn't likely to last."
We have a global network of humanity, yet our government structures are still based on ancient geographical distinctions. In order to govern the net (and to coin another useless buzzword) we need Government 2.0.
Sesame seed bun is on two all spam patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles and onions.
they should have terminated their contract with these assholes immediately instead of letting them back up.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I can't find an abilena.podolsk-mo.ru any more. It's giving me an NXDOMAIN, though that could be the firewall here.
Pity that, I was thinking about pinging them a few million times. You know, as a connectivity test.
I gotta say the past week without so much SPAM has been like having a 10 year head cold where I've become more and more congested...and just lived with it. To suddenly have the congestion stop for just a week....I almost forgot what life is SUPPOSED to be like without a clogged sinus of an Inbox. Damn spammers! I wish I could have one pointed out and slap them up side the head....and then let the other million of people get to slap them. Then after that slapfest.....find a person that bought something from a spammer and slap them. If there were ever a time for authorities to get involved...it would be now! Raid that ISP and you know they'd catch some guilty folks...some of which could flip.
I did so like not having to have all that crap in my server's inbox
I hope this caused some synapses to fire.
What, you mean TeliaSonera?
By the way, no one click on that link.
This is an example of the old saying "The Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it".
Unfortunately, this is happening for the bad guys as well as us.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
After whacking down a mole, they continue to pop up!
I don't see why. 15MB/sec for 12 hours is rougly 650 gigs - a lot, but a single external hard drive could have pulled it off. At most they shaved a week off their time to get the botnets back up and running at full capacity.
My penis thanks them, my very very large penis which is located in a recently refinanced home, that is.
Now as soon as my good friend MR AUSTINE OWOH is able to complete the transfer of my long lost uncle's estate from probate in Nigeria to my onshore checking account, I will be perfect, perfect with a very very large penis, that is.
I have gotten one item of spam in the 3...4? years i've had gmail and no false positives. I have some bacn because i'm too lazy to unsubscribe. Now my phone on the other hand... i get about 30calls a day for bs i dont want.
Or use a modified HARM missile on them.
We should have removed all of the infrastructure, not only removed the connection to the internet, so they don't start over again from another place.
These female donkey anal orifices are like cancer in which you remove one tumor but it metastasize to another site to grow again. We need to remove this cancer from the internet.
Kill them with FIRE. NOW. Before they spread AGAIN.
Let's say you rent some space anf open a small convenience store. You work hard and make a modest living. Then your landlord rents out the shop next door to a crack dealer who's thriving business attracts a swarm of lowlifes who destroy the neighborhood. Are you going to be upset with the neighborhood watch when they make a fuss, or are you going to be upset with your landlord?
-- Will program for bandwidth
Question of the day: is this a mediocre troll or do you actually believe this? Your complaint doesn't exactly line up with the facts.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
who let them back up ? Contracts be damned.
People want drugs.
No one wants spam.
Your comparison of the two doesn't make any sense.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Just let the spammers, malware pushers, and con artists clog up the net?
The real question is, who's protecting these scumbags and why? Why has it taken so long to do anything about them?
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
At some point it de-evolves to the Judge Dredd scenario... People driving around metting out instant 'justice', with no review or appeals process to speak of.
...but he IS the law.
The solution is to have a free for all, whereby vaccine writers are free to play by the same rules as virus writers.
One way to knock out the botnet would be a write a viral vaccine that infects the PC, knocks out the bot, plugs all known holes then attempts to infect all other PCs with itself. If it hasn't managed to get a successful infection after a period of time it takes that as an indication that it has been successful and it eliminates itself from its host.
If you have "malware" on your computer, your private data is already being exposed. It could just as well be a bot net operator whose combing through your data. Who'd you rather have digging through your infected computer?
Besides, the guys used possibly ill-gotten information that was true to convince the upstream provider to shut down the ISP. The experts didn't run into the data center, pulling plugs in a rage...though that might make a neat comic book. In truth, you should blame the upstream providers. Seriously, this isn't Governments running around meting out justice. This is companies listening to private organizations.
import system.cool.Sig;
What are you smoking? Or rather, are you someone arguing a point without a clue.
Whether they had any legit customers is suspect. If they did, I'm sure they would have come to light very quickly.
No, your ISP will be notified about spam originating from its networks and they'll either deal with the user who is undoubtedly violating their TOS or the ISP's IP range will be entered into mail blackhole lists. Nothing new there.
Unlikely, and sadly you probably won't get punted off the net like you should. Instead, your computer will continue to be abused for the purposes of these criminals.
Your efforts to compare this to the drug war are completely irrational, as their causes and symptoms are wildly different. On top of that, there was no government involvement here.
No, only about half of them.
Yes, yes you did epic fail.
"legitimate commercial enterprise"
If you are so keen on this "enterprise", post your email address and we will see how you feel about getting a thousand spam emails a day.
Frankly, it is time that Russia was pulled into line on this matter. An international incident might be just the thing to do this.
If you allow your PC to be infected by trojans, your privacy just went out the door anyway. Why would you care if researchers looked at your stuff when criminals already can????
To use your analogy, sir... I would get a camcorder and record the activity. I would then turn that over to the police and wait for the wheels of justice to smash the dealer into hamburger. Then, as he could no longer pay rent, my landlord would find a new tenant who would very probably NOT deal drugs. So no, I wouldn't harbor any ill-will towards the landlord, why would I? My money's as good as the next person's, and I can't expect him to know in advance about something like this.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Oh suck it.
You sound like a spammer trying to make his business looks good and honest. At the end of the day, it's still unsolicited garbage thrown at you about scams, possibly dangerous medication and viruses leading to botnets and DDoS attacks. There's absolutely no redeeming quality about this kind of activity. At least for drugs you can be sympathetic to the scarface type of drug overlords, the poor farmers trying to make ends meet and the employment of thousands of people...right? right?!
they're down! forget slashdotted, they're internetted!
I assume this is a troll. The takedown was hardcore and more or less triple-damage win. Props to the guy from the Post are what is in order.
wonder how all those security researchers feel after destroying a legitimate commercial enterprise and affecting a lot of people who weren't spammers. Must have been pretty righteous. Of course, now it looks like they're going to have to play a game of whack-a-mole. What ISP shall die next at the hands of vigilante justice? Will my internet connection go down because someone uses my ISP for spam?
Well, frankly, yes. An ISP that turns a blind eye to such activities as accused, is just as good as helping the bad guys. And guess what... this is a war where almost anyone is willing to take casualties to end it. Now the innocent bystanders know they were dealing with shit for an ISP and have a big sign in front of their face to move to someone more reputable. It is a win for everyone, except the nefarious spammers/botnet operators that were put out by it. There is no sympathy for these folks.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
So you're comfortable with your small penis, then? Okay, more seriously though -- if spam wasn't profitable nobody would be doing it. My comparison of the two is based on how people are attacking the problem, not the source of the problem.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Obviously some people do want spam, or at least buy things from spammers. If they didn't, no one would send out spam. His comparison does make sense, spam is big business. As long as it's profitable, it will exist. When it ceases to be so, it will go away.
Find coupons in Greeley
Wait, are we talking about the same "legitimate commercial enterprise" mentioned in this story, the one that apparently came back from the dead just long enough to pass off control of a botnet? If anything, this followup story proves that McColo's death wasn't just justified, it was long overdue.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
This pretty much shows how certain ISP's help spammers. Particularly since they did not IMMEDIATELY bring up their backup link. Instead they waited until the weekend.
I wonder how all those security researchers feel after destroying a legitimate commercial enterprise and affecting a lot of people who weren't spammers.
RTFA. They reported TOS violations to upstream providers. It's not like they firebombed the data center. Furthermore, the presence of legitimate clients isn't that great a defense - lots of criminal enterprises have "fronts" that do legit business to mask the illegal activities.
And when your drug-dealer neighbors are right over the border outside your PD's jurisdiction and the other PD has no interest in pursuing it?
To continue the analogy.
If most of internet spam is sent by very few people, and all this movement of information enables to track them better and maybe, finally, get them, the people source of most spam could end offline (and with a bit of luck, in guantanamo/siberia/wherever waterboarded 24/7)
And if the police do nothing?
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Er, you can't communicate with a botnet with a harddrive, you know.
So, how long have you been beating your wife for, Mr. Fulcrum?
My complaint is that the first ISP that this botnet used is now in shambles. Now the backup ISP for this has gone active and transferred control to a third ISP in Russia. I'm just curious to find out how long those other ISPs are going to be around, and whether we as a community are prepared to deal with where this line of thinking ends. What's to prevent them from doing this every few months and leaving a trail of dead service providers in the wake of our new definition of "justice" as the botnet owners simply hop from one provider to the next?
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
That's why your comparison doesn't make any sense. Drugs are a demand driven problem; attacking supply centers simply leads to more supply popping up. Spam is a supply driven problem; attacking supply centers leads to less spam.
If you really think that ISPs will continue to operate with gray customers, I guess you might think this is wack-a-mole, but ISPs have plenty of legitimate business and will have no problem ceasing doing business with spammers. This ISP didn't do that and learned a hard lesson. They were not a good-actor here.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
And even if it were possible to get all the root servers to agree on tossing the bad guys out, the bad guys would just switch to using IPs. I don't know if it's possible, given the "route around obstructions" nature of the net, to "remove" routes to the offending servers, but I doubt that. Besides, that'd have to happen in Russia.
On the other hand, given Putin's heroic track record, he just might personally find and snuff the spammers out. Wasn't there a spammer killed in Russia several years ago?
/var/run/twitter.sock is a twitter socket puppet.
Damn you! No, I didn't click on the link, but now thanks to you, I've got beans up my nose.
Nuke them from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Sadly, it's true :(
In this highly hypothetical situation, I'd go to the local TV station with my recording(s) and a statement from the police indicating their lack of interest.
And "to continue the analogy" if that doesn't work I'll just transform into Optimus Prime and destroy anyone who keeps on about hypothetical situations instead of using common sense.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I believe the phrase is:
If you aren't part of a the solution, you're part of the problem.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
What's to prevent them from doing this every few months and leaving a trail of dead service providers in the wake of our new definition of "justice" as the botnet owners simply hop from one provider to the next?
That's simple - ISPs that value their continued existence will enforce their anti-spam/botnet policies rather than look the other way and take money from anyone who can pay. This isn't vigilantism, it's the upstream ISP dropping connectivity for contract violations when informed of the situation at one of their downstreams.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Sigh
Way to ignore the obvious facts here.
The ISP had the option of blocking off the spammers.
They did not. Eventually, ISP who do not stop spam will be disconnected. The ISP that supported this botnet SHOULD be a shambles, they became that when they decided not to stop their clients spamming.
What will prevent them from going to new ISP is that ISP probably dont like being put out of business completely.
This should be a salutory lesson for the next ISP that is told they are sending spam.
I see no ethical issues, unless you are a spammer.
But I suspect troll is closer to the mark.
you're quite the busybody there, aren't ya? yet you complain about other busybodies for knocking spammers offline. make up your mind Optimus Second.
Stop Computers/Cars Analogies on S
And if it's not against the law right over the border?
Also, I should point out you ran with the hypothetical instead of reverting to the car analogy.
It's the same exact problem.
Even if I pull numbers out of my ass and say that small % of the human population want illegal drugs, there's also a small population that responds to spam, sadly, wanting cheap viagra, etc.
The difference next to nothing.
Why do you think I eventually stopped beating my wife?
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
The Epic Fail is simply describable as "Government - always slow, expensive, stupid, and with perverse unintended consequences"
That may sound glib, but in a nutshell that's what economists like Milton Friedman and Murray Rothbard based their life's work upon.
Part of the Second American Revolution!
Apparently TeliaSonera shut down the link as soon as they realised what was happening - the contract was through a proxy company.
See the Register article for more details.
So we can't really blame TeliaSonera.
Why the spamming bastards didn't just courier a hard drive to Russia instead is a mystery, though.
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
> Drugs are a demand driven problem; attacking supply centers simply leads to more supply popping up.
But if there wasn't a supply in the first place, there wouldn't be a demand problem... or so goes the logic. Attacking supply centers leads to higher costs as supply has diminished. Because the price is now higher, there's now more incentive for an agent to enter the market who can produce at a lower price. There's a few extra steps in this that make calling it either a supply or a demand problem a meaningless distinction; It's a self-balancing system.
E-mail is cheaper than a millionth of a penny in actual costs, so I don't see any way to resolve the issue. If there's even one person who would reply and buy $40 worth of penis enlargement pills, that one person has just paid for about 20 billion e-mails to try to find the next person. Attacking the suppliers doesn't remove the economic incentive, which was the entire point of my original post!
It's a self-correcting system... At best they'll reduce supply to the point that new players enter the market who might be better prepared and vested in evading detection to protect their profits. This, of course, makes them even more difficult to detect and then turn over to the authorities to face prosecution. Taking away their means of production accomplishes nothing because the cost of re-entering the market is effectively zero.
The only long-term strategy that will have any impact is to use the criminal justice system to tag and bag these people. And at that, it's not a solution but a band-aid, but it will help more than vigilantism.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I must agree while it seems more difficult this is a problem that must be fought both at the source and the target. Its one thing to go after bot net operators but someone should be going after negligent individuals who allow devices they are responsible for to become bots. I think the network must be managed. I think internet access SHOULD BE LICENSED, we don't let you drive a car on our public road without one because the hazard it would pose to others persons and property. We should not let you on our public network where your improperly operated equipment might threaten the use of mine and others.
There should be an exam that all individuals with access must pass that is demonstrative of some learning about how tcp/ip works, what firewalling is, why maintaining your systems is important. I don't think you should be liable for something a cracker does with your system after you have been 0wn3d because that would pose to much risk but you should get cut off. If you can't demonstrait that you attempted to maintain your systems they you should not be let back on.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
During that time, McColo was observed pushing as much as 15MB of data per second to servers located in Russia
The massive amounts of data they were talking about were being pushed to other servers, so they could have done that work with a hard drive. However, it also says that the botnet was updated. Assuming that the botnet couldn't have been updated from those same russian servers, they could have done any number of things, including any number of regular internet connections to buildings nearby or satellite/cellular internet service.
I doubt, however, that the data center was a single point of failure for them. The idea that the malware builders can build massive botnets with distributed architecture that elude understanding by security researchers, but they can't figure out how to make it so that they can run it from a backup data center, seems unlikely to me.
Yeah, that's really ethical -- since everybody else is robbing the store, I suppose I can help myself too.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
It's not like it's going to really stop spam, child pornography, or identity theft.
All that bandwidth used by spam keeps a network admin employed somewhere, and keeps the justice department busy prosecuting people under the can spam act.
if spam wasn't profitable nobody would be doing it
Not necessarily. Spam may not be profitable, spamming may be. If you convince someone to pay you to spam for them, whether or not the spam itself generates any profit, you hustled them out of the money.
Life doesn't work that way. Dope dealer after dealer would flock to the complaisant landlord--despite the busting of the previous dealer--just like spam/malware pushers would flock to the complaisant ISP after one got caught.
And spammers are harder than drug dealers to prove guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
If an ISP facilitates trespass on my computer, then the ISP is WRONG and should be stopped. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
The innocent bystanders with perfect knowledge of the situation defense... I can't believe you got a +5 for trying to tell people they should know better. "My car exploded because of defective fuel lines!" "Well you should have expected that since everybody knows the manufacturer was poor quality."
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
They obviously aren't a legitimate commercial enterprise, though - their actions in attempting to transfer control of the botnet on Saturday prove this.
To use your 'war on drugs' analogy, they are like a bunch of dealers operating under cover of a pizza delivery service.
They get shut down, and people like you whinge because you liked their pizza, even though you never bought their drugs.
Get over it and choose a different pizza joint.
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
The use of a server located in Russia for C&C of the botnet is probably not as desirable as a US based host because of the large numbers of companies and ISPs which either black hole China and Russia entirely or subject traffic coming from and going to those parts of the Internet to much greater firewall scrutiny. I can see why they wanted the US server hosting in the first place while keeping the Russian datacenter as the backup plan.
The article said they had to update the command & control data for the botnets. The 'nets won't let just any computer control them, and this Russian server probably wasn't on the master list, so they needed to get back online with their old DNS hostname first.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
> Whether they had any legit customers is suspect. If they did, I'm sure they would have come to light very quickly.
You're making an assumption, just like they did.
> No, your ISP will be notified about spam originating from its networks and they'll either deal with the user who is undoubtedly violating their TOS or the ISP's IP range will be entered into mail blackhole lists.
That isn't what happened here, sir.
> Unlikely, and sadly you probably won't get punted off the net like you should. Instead, your computer will continue to be abused for the purposes of these criminals.
> Your efforts to compare this to the drug war are completely irrational, as their causes and symptoms are wildly different. On top of that, there was no government involvement here.
They're both caused by socially disadvantaged people who are desperate for a solution to their problems. The symptoms are a proliferation of product that the majority of people don't want. And the solutions thus far have both been aggressive prosecution, vaguely defined law enforcement actions, public denunciation, etc. It's not irrational to compare them -- they're both unwanted, and they both have unintended consequences.
Right, because the operator should be punished for the manufacturer's failings.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
You didn't answer the question. By you being careless/clueless enough to become infected, your data is already exposed for anyone who cares to pay. Who would you rather have digging through your data?
And, by your poorly chosen analogy, researchers studying the malware generated traffic of your data back to the operators are "robbing the store".
Just because they're in a store, doesn't mean they're stealing. Hell, they may be trying to stock up on TP. I know I would.
Anyways, you're new here. Welcome to /.
import system.cool.Sig;
...if that doesn't work I'll just transform into Optimus Prime...
Good telco, that.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
And when the police force the entire building to be shutdown because of the meth lab, and you are unable to do your business?
Question is why wasn't the ISP watching it's customers for this obvious violation of ToS? If they just wanted the money from the bot netters, they deserve whatever happens to their company.
I repeat, how do you get "vigilantes" out of that ? I could understand it if the researchers cut the fibre leading to the building, but reporting the malicious activity to the persons who were carrying it ? I also would prefer it if you used the term IPP (internet presence provider) rather than ISP, as ISPs usually provide connectivity whereas IPPs provide hosting. They are not always the same (type of) organisation. No ISPs suffered through this action as they were the ones taking action, in fact their "tubes" were probably a bit less clogged as a result.
Get a grip !
Anyway, if you were unlucky enough to be using McColo for hosting, then I wouldn't suggest you trust the integrity of your own sites or machines. Better off moving hosts and using verified backups.
I think you missed the point -- often times, a system can become infected without the user taking any action. It can't be the user's fault 100% of the time unless the technology is perfect, flawless, and that isn't true. Neither of which addresses the issue of whether it's okay for someone to enter my system just because they flashed a "researcher" badge.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
A significant percentage of the human population (in the United States) wants illegal drugs.
Spam is driven by the people purchasing the spam runs, not by the people who get the spam. I guess there might be several million people who repeatedly buy penis enlargement pills and other drugs over the internet, but I don't really think so.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
More like "You now have no reason to acknowledge that your car is going to blow up in your face. Any putting off getting a new car only gets you what you deserve"
It appears that the new C&C server listed in the article, 62.176.17.200, has been blackholed by my ISP's routers. I'm on a Qwest "business/office" ADSL line. Any similar reports from other ISP's?
Or is it actually down?
If most American ISPs are blocking it, Rustock is dead, or at least in a coma. TFA implied that the IP address was being distributed to the bot, not the domain name.
Legalize recreational marijuana. Seriously.
I think a better analogy to this would be if your landlord rented out a special space where people could sell things (kind of like a mall) and many of the tenants used their rented space to sell drugs, or child pornography, or guns, or other illegal things.
Now for some reason, it turns out that the people renting out space to do illegal things are foreign ambassadors, and the government can't directly touch them.
I don't know about you, but I think it makes sense for the government to go after who they can, and take down the landlord, even with the legitimate tenants.
On a more direct note, I don't think that a lot of commercial enterprises were using McColo. I am quite sure that McColo's unique stance on legal matters made the cost of it far more than a normal provider, and there certainly is no lack of commercial hosting providers. Further, McColo was very well known for questionably legal activities. If you were using their hosting services, even if it was for legal things, chances are you were well aware what everyone else was doing.
I really don't see what the problem is, it's not like the government did this without warning. You can bet McColo has gotten numerous notices requesting that they stop helping spammers and bot-net controllers, but they simply chose to ignore them. They were knowingly participating in illegal activities, so the government shut them down. Seems pretty simple, really.
WTF? Are you one of those spammers and botnet herders? You are a whiny little ass, you know that? And, you are probably a drug abuser, judging from your moronic WOD comments.
This POS ISP could have taken care of the situation but didn't. So, people went to the ISPs upstream provider and reported the lack of action and violation of TOS. You know, they followed the fucking process.
Tell me, are you one of these assholes who thinks they should be able to run roughshod over everyone else then cries like a little bitch and says it is so unfair when the tables are turned? You sure sound like it.
Maybe you should go back down into your mommy's basement, light up, and waste the rest of your life in a haze. It is not like you can actually deal with the real world and personal responsibility.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
The facts do not support the conclusions here! Fundamentally, the argument that people keep siding with is "it's okay to nuke an ISP that harbors spammers." This argument is made on emotion -- the frustration we all share about receiving spam and it's negative impact. Those emotions don't consider the unintended consequences, which is that innocent people can be harmed when this course of action is taken. The legal system in this country is heavily slanted towards keeping the innocents out of the line of fire at whatever cost; An ethical principle I happen to agree with.
The ISPs need to be held legally accountable for harboring spammers, which means using legal methods to make the cost of doing so high enough that they comply. By going through the backdoor and shutting off their connections, this weakens the entire market and the infrastructure of the internet at large -- because we are implying then that our personal ethics are more important than our legal obligations. What we're saying here is that agents in the market of providing internet services are free to excercise their own judgement -- which also means now they are liable for things like copyright infringement, or people passing child porn through their network, etc. It opens the door to accusations of selective enforcement, discrimination, and worse.
And calling me a troll, or saying that I support spammers, or that I am a spammer... Is a cheap way of ducking an uncomfortable truth.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
In order to govern the net (and to coin another useless buzzword) we need Government 2.0.
Reinventing government? Let me guess...
1) Without that pesky Bill of Rights.
2) Online (where malware authors can take it over).
Thanks but no thanks.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The problem is, once you give the government jurisdiction to decide who can and cannot use the Internet, they will use that power to further their own interests rather than yours.
No politician will ever vote to decrease his own power.
I believe the phrase is:
If you aren't part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
So, the dickheads at McColo went out of their way to reopen a link, just in time for their Russian Mafia buddies to rehost their shit. Thinking of research topics off the top of my head, I wonder if I could match the actions at McColo to 1) Wire Fraud, or 2) RICO. A conviction on either leads one straight to a Federal Pound-You-In-The-Ass prison, and no parole.
Luke, help me take this mask off
To start, having my infected computer crash yours is not even close to having my car crash into yours. I'm sorry but that just makes no sense whatsoever...
Besides that incredibly flawed analogy, I have some questions, such as:
*Who would administer these exams?
*How does one go about getting internet access enabled again?
*Is this controlled at the government level or by the ISPs?
*What happens if a country or ISP doesn't comply, do we not allow them on the internet?
*How do you verify that your license is valid?
*Who pays for the tests/how much does a license cost?
*How does this work if, say, I go to my friends house and use his/her internet connection?
*How does one verify that your computer has been compromised, and not that you are just doing something slightly out of the ordinary?
There are dozens if not hundreds more but I'm going to stop there. I really hope you weren't being serious...
I think you are exactly right.
The delay in bringing up the backup server was probably because they were waiting for the old IP to get flushed out of DNS server caches. They probably knew it wasn't going to last long before they got shut off, so they wanted to make sure every bot could find them while they were up.
Legalize recreational marijuana. Seriously.
TeliaSonera I seem to recall is one of the ISPs used by RapidShare. What might be the repercussions if someone goes after TeliaSonera?
Let's use a different analogy. You rent one half of a house from your landlord. The person who rents the other half adopts a puppy, who uses your flower garden as a bathroom. Your fellow renter refuses to train their puppy to avoid ruining your garden, despite repeated requests to do so. So you take pictures of your fellow renter with their dog and hand them over to your landlord, who terminates your fellow renter's lease for violating the "no pets" clause of the lease.
First and foremost, you are not a we. You do not speak for me or anyone other than yourself, so stop using we.
You keep forgetting that McColo had a contract with it's ISP which stated that it would not support spam and malware and that McColo completely ignored that part of the contract.
What about McColo's legal obligations? What about McColo's legal obligations to the upstream providers to uphold the contract between the upstream providers and McColo?
Do you want to know what our legal obligation is? It is to report spammers to their ISPs. And, if that ISP will not do anything about the spammers, it is our legal obligation to report the ISP to the upstream providers.
You are not a troll. You are whiney, immature asshole. Grow the fuck up.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Making a fuss is writing down the license plate numbers of vistors to the crack house and tipping off the local news media to the lack of police intervention. Making a fuss is standing on the sidewalk handing out literature and carrying signs. Snipping the power and phone lines, turning off the water and gas, nailing plywood over the windows, taping up the ventilation systems, and changing the locks on the door? That goes well beyond 'making a fuss'.
I realize that there are others who are already more than knowledgeable about McColo. I just wanted to add an observation from a look at McColo's "about" page archived on the wayback machine: the site designer links back to a Russian domain, and the corporate address is a drop box in Delaware. It wouldn't surprise me if the only US-based "employees" were a handful of independent contractors swapping equipment out at the San Jose data center.
Luke, help me take this mask off
It's weird when I read stories like this, and makes me question the sucess rate of SPAM anymore. With end-user products seemingly getting a little better each time at filtering, along with pretty damn good filters in products like Gmail, and corporations usually ponying up some big bucks for a good filtering service (e.g. Messagelabs), it makes you wonder who's still successful at the SPAM game?
And yes, for the record, I'm strictly referring to SPAM here. Botnets controlling spyware/malware I'm certain are still VERY sucessful, which still sucks for the masses.
I honestly can't remember the last time I got a SPAM message in any Inbox. Definitely a refreshing change from back in the day when I used to receive more spam to my personal account than 100+ mailboxes combined at work...Am I alone here in my SPAM-free world?
Funny that - you're willing to take ISP's to task for turning a blind eye to spammers... But I bet you'd be the first to foam at the mouth if they shut down a file sharer.
Almost anyone without scruples or morals, maybe. Those of us with both disagree. We actually care about the rights of others.
As i understand it, that is exactly what the security researchers did. What happened (by analogy) was that the person that the landlord in turn rented from kicked him out. I don't think you can really place the blame on the security researchers in this case.
Nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
2. I'd rather deal with spam, malware, and con artists clogging the internet than vigilantes blowing holes in it.
Girlintraining,
I don't mean to insult you, but you are commenting from a position of ignorance on this topic. There was no vigilantism here. Illegal activity was taking place that also violated contracts between corporations. Third-party complainants contacted both corporations to complain of the illegal activity and contract violations. The corporations chose to dissolve their contractual relationship. Nobody was hurt as a result of the complaints that were levied.
If you do understand this topic, and you are aware of specific innocent customers that were harmed by the upstream providers terminating service to McColo, then you should easily be able to provide a Whois reference for one of these innocent customers.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
That's the sound of rejoicing from all the people who make their living from selling anti spyware/malware/spam software/hardware...
(I was going to write "solutions" instead of software/hardware but they haven't actually solved anything, people are still and will forever be infected/bombarded)
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
OK, we have more pirates thanks to Somalia. But I don't think it's helping global warming as much as we had anticipated.
And now this...
It's pretty clear that the policies and practices that are being implemented around the world are totally insufficient to deal with the return or rise of the anarchists that have been around since Robin Hood, Blackbeard, and Ali Baba.
I hate to mention this but I'm thinking that some of these won't be solved by saying, "Please stop". We are reaching a tipping point between the notion of preemptive military strikes and politically based solutions.
Russia is not proving itself a very effective government and actually a festering zone for illegal activities. Can't we just launch a DDOS against .ru and be done with it? I'm pretty sure the rest of the world outnumbers those jerks.
Of course the governments can claim no involvement of this activity but extend a willingness to discuss how to resolve a DDOS on .ru in a peaceful manner.
Similarly, this political/legal gamesmanship around Somalia is a joke. I see no reason why a nation cannot exercise any means necessary to protect their own shipping, or others with there permission.
It's a joke. And the mob, gangstas, and terrorists will take all of this to their fullest advantage.
So how hard would it really be to DDOS a nation if brought on in a multi-national deployment?
teliasonera are huge (according to wikipedia they are transit free but with paid peering, what I tend to reffer to as a wannabe tier 1 ) and afaict they pulled the plug on this as soon as they worked out it was mccolo on the other end. I very much doubt there will be any serious repercussions for them.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
This is almost too stupid a post to bother replying to, so I'll do it anonymoosely
Duh you connect the drive to the new server and then connect to the botnet. Asshats abound here don't they.
Exactly, the ISP didn't get shut down, a group of security researchers got the ISP to shut off a customer that was breaking the terms of use.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
How did they get back online? Even if it was for just a short time, being able to re-activate their botnet this way?
I am rather "done" with the question about whether or not it is immoral to go vigilante on their asses. It is immoral to let things go on without doing anything about it and so you're damned if you do and damned if you don't... but if you do, at least a problem will have been fought and maybe some useful difference made.
innocent people can be harmed when this course of action is taken.
So what? This always happens. If we stopped doing things every time it could harm an innocent, we wouldn't do anything.
we are implying then that our personal ethics are more important than our legal obligations.
What you mean we, paleface? Anyway, what of McColo's legal obligations to its upstream? Oh yeah, they blew them off and got turned off.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Tracing route to 62.176.17.200 over a maximum of 30 hops
1 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms x.x.x.x
2 4 ms 4 ms 4 ms x.x.x.x [x.x.x.x]
3 P2-2.LCR-02.PITBPA.verizon-gni.net [130.81.32.202] reports: Destination host unreachable.
In the words of Wikipedia, cite please. Because you're talking out of your ass.
You then claim that people are legally obligated to report ISPs to their upstream providers. I'm laughing, now.
Again, cite please.
It is also not anyone but McColo and their immediate upstream provider and the civil court system to mediate contract disputes, not anyone else. In fact, there's a concept you might want to learn about, "tortious interference", relating to third parties interfering in contracts between a first and second party.
I thought it was mccolo's upstream that cut them off.
As to whether or not the goverment told them to cut off mccolo, I don't know.
Wow. And here I was going to say that this latest development (if the previous ones weren't enough) seemed to be rock-solid evidence that the people who run McColo knew exactly what they were hosting, and should go to prison for a long, long time.
Kythe
Let's block Russia!
Ahh, but what if there are two groups of innocent bystanders, one of which is two or three orders of magnitude than the other, and protecting one means failing the other. Then what?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Selling spam is not hustling any more than selling cars, furnace repair, or sex is: In any case, money is exchanged for goods and services.
I certainly get my share of spam, so I'd guess that on a given day they're generally doing pretty well at performing the services they were hired for.
Kid-proof tablet..
If it's DNS hostnames you're worried about, I've got some ocean-front property in in-addr.arpa to sell you . . .
Kid-proof tablet..
QUICK NOTE TO SLASHDOTTERS:
Do not feed the troll. If you can't look at the name and immediately recognize 4chan retardism, you should probably NOT be on slashdot.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Damn, no mod points for me. I was wondering if a troll could be modded as "over rated".
If an ISP, or any of their customers, are in violation of the upstream provider's TOS, then it is the upstream provider's decision on what to do about the matter. I would hope that most upstream providers would notify the ISP that they are in violation, and give them the opportunity to correct the situation, but it could also very well end up with the ISP being disconnected. Very likely the contracts in place allow the upstream provider a lot of discretion in how to handle the matter. It was, after all, the upstream providers that pulled the plug after learning of the ISP's nefarious actions. This has nothing to do with criminal law, but rather civil law. If the ISP feels that it was disconnected for TOS violation unfairly, then they have every right to pursue remedy in the civil courts. I fail to see how breach of contract in civil law has anything to do with criminal laws dealing with drugs.
As for what happens when your machine is compromised. You should have known better. There is no way you can legitimately play the innocent victim. You are here on slashdot which implies that you are not a "Joe Luser" that doesn't know how to secure your systems from 99% or more of the malware that is out there. Please don't advocate for "Joe Luser" either. Problems like malware, botnets, and SPAM will continue to grow as long as "Joe Luser" is treated with kid gloves. It would suck to made an example of because of ignorance, but examples need to be made so that other "Joe Lusers" will wake up and learn enough to take care of their machines.
Note - Liberal use of <sarcasm> tags may or may not need to be applied.
Me ducking uncomfortable truth? LOL.
You said
The ISPs need to be held legally accountable for harboring spammers, which means using legal methods to make the cost of doing so high enough that they comply. By going through the backdoor and shutting off their connections,
Do you understand what a contract is?
Its very easy. They signed a terms of service agreement, then broke it, and refused to comply. There is nothing "backdoor" here.
You make alot of claims, but offer no evidence to support your claims. Nice try at a scare campaign, but "Epic fail"
The rest has been covered nicely by davev1.
You foolishly assume the police gives a fuck about you.
They don't. Video evidence or not, they just don't care. They work a shit job, for shit money, and get treated like shit by large swathes of society for being "party poopers". Do you sincerely believe they will take special interest in your well-being and put their own at risk to chase down small-time hoodlums ?
-Billco, Fnarg.com
The wisdom of Spock applies I think.
Sometimes the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
QUICK NOTE TO SLASHDOTTER #864651:
Do not anger the /b/tards, for they are unsubtle and quick to anger! If you can't look at the thread and immediately recognize Slashdot groupthink, you should probably NOT be on the internets.
KTHXBAI!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
If ISPs enabled customers to block incoming and outgoing traffic at the ISP level on a per-port, time-of-day, per-authentication-token, or other basis, botnets would be greatly weakened.
If I, as a customer, say "allow port 80 and 443 outbound 24x7, IRC ports in and out 4PM-1AM and 6AM-8AM M-F + weekends, 25 only within the ISP's Walled Garden, ftp main 24x7 ftp data only when ftp main active, all other ports blocked 24x7" then no matter what virus gets on my computer, it can't send through port 25 to anywhere but your server and it can't connect to IRC bot-rooms while I'm at work or in the wee hours of the morning.
Now, for unsophisticated users, the ISPs would have to have a "wizard" that with the right password opened ports based on what applications you had installed and what applications you installed in the future. This wizard would likely only be created for "popular" OSes typically run by non-techies.
The "authentication token" could be per-machine, per-user, or per-application, but these would require some level of deep packet inspection and custom client software on either the computer or the LAN router.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Killing a spam/malware friendly site or ISP is worth the collateral damage, IMO.
Anyone hosting with a spammer-friendly ISP should know better.
Meanwhile, my mail server firewalls "the world" against all connections from sources with whom we have no legitimate business. Cuts spam by 95 percent or better.
Flame on, those with Utopian delusions who do not get it.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
McColo doesn't seem to have been a real ISP. Or even a real company. They don't have a valid corporate registration in California or New Jersey. They were apparently a front for the spam operation, buying services from Hurricane Electric.
Their web site was designed by Vane, in Russia. They still have some connection to McColo. Go to the Vane site (preferably not using IE on Windows) and look at the icons of the various companies with which they are affiliated. Go to the row of vertical bars at the center right, second row. Mouse over the blank area just above the bars. You'll get some Cyrillic with "McColo" in Latin text. Click on the hidden link. This will take you to an animation which brings up an image of the McColo site. Items within that animation are clickable. A bit of work will get you to the number of McColo's "sales manager". But there's no way to order hosting on line; they were never really selling ordinary hosting services.
Other folks have already pointed out the moral relativity of the situation. I'm not going to go into how you expect to find a perfect technology that resolves sticky situations or relieves us of these "I'll take what we know is best for now and later"
Car Analogy time! Do you hold auto makers responsible for vehicle deaths because they didn't engineer them to stop perfectly or avoid accidents, regardless of the driver's skill? Do you not applaud the efforts of those trying to make those same vehicles safer?
import system.cool.Sig;
I wonder how all those security researchers feel after destroying a legitimate commercial enterprise and affecting a lot of people who weren't spammers. Must have been pretty righteous. Of course, now it looks like they're going to have to play a game of whack-a-mole. What ISP shall die next at the hands of vigilante justice? Will my internet connection go down because someone uses my ISP for spam? If my computer becomes infected with malware, how long before I have 'researchers' digging through my private data? What will the next press release say -- Russian NAPs taken offline by massive DDoS initiated by "researchers" from the United States? How long until this kind of behavior sparks an international incident?
Please feel free to show where in this case the researchers implemented a DDoS or otherwise took matters in their own hands to remove systems' network access. Otherwise, nice try at fear-mongering.
This is all eerily similar in scope, methods, and results to a real world issue; The war on drugs. You see, there's an economic incentive to do this. As long as that incentive remains, all you're doing is changing the face of the problem. Today it's hackers in Sweden. Tomorrow it's script kiddies in Russia. Next week it'll be unemployed programmers in Romania. And how can people justify this kind of behavior in the name of "research"? It's the same kind of attitude that the DEA has -- which is to use ever-increasing levels of force, and to continually lower the standards they have to adhere to in order to "catch more criminals". At some point it de-evolves to the Judge Dredd scenario... People driving around metting out instant 'justice', with no review or appeals process to speak of.
Ahhh. The "War on Drugs." I see where the fear-mongering came from; taking notes.
This so-called "War on Drugs" has little resemblance to this situation. Other than the fact that both of these involve crime. Unless you think this is some sort of cultural war as well?
So let's widen your scope a bit. Crime in general. Usually an economic incentive. Often implementing tactics and strategies that haven't changed for decades, if not centuries (heck... getting closer to apples-to-apples, many con games are over a hundred years old and still employed today... digitally even). Still illegal, still prosecuted. I suppose this is the wrong mind-set? We should just stop? Accept crime?
I don't condone all the horror-story scenarios you're suggesting. I'm no fan of the "War on Drugs" or the DEA. I don't support private DDoS tools or counter-intrusion methodology (Welchia is a nice object lesson). But then... NONE of that has anything to do with this case. But they do make nice boogey-men, don't they?
They don't connect to the botnet, the botnet connects to them. That's why they needed McColo back up, so that the bots could get new instructions on where to look. And oh yeah I almost forgot: Duh.
... who is now sitting at home, unemployed. He still remembers the time when his boss, Guri Orlovsky, called him from Russia: "ah my good friend! I will send you caviar and vodka for your vork ! Now change the harddrive !"
...
It was such a happy time for him... Now he no longer has this job...
Won't somebody think of the henchmen!
Sniff...
not really
How would that be any better than using a new server, since TeliaSonera would give them a different IP address then they used to have?
Hey, here's an ideal way of making a profit on these people: The War On Piracy! ...and this time, actually have the support of the public for it!
Bomb them! Send the army there! Spend trillions of dollars!
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
Basically you want to go back to the good old days when it was really hard to get online at all, so the barrier to entry was high. Consumer ISPs lowered the barrier to entry, allowing all sorts of people online.
I do not think that the consequences have been purely negative, or even negative on balance. My parents are nobody's idea of computer scientists, but I am happy to be able to talk to them over Skype. On the other hand, if they got infected they would have no idea of how to fix it, or perhaps they would not even notice that they had been infected. I address this in the Correct Way: technology and education. They have a firewall, the OS and major apps all have auto-update, and they know what is and is not Safe On The Internet.
We make people take driving exams because of the probability of death and property damage associated with incompetent driving. The internet does not really have the same level of danger associated with it.
As an aside, I would be all in favour of mandatory driving licence re-tests every ten years or so, as well as adding motorway driving, night driving, and skid-pan sessions to the training. That is a lot more likely to make a difference in the real world than reducing the level of spam.
" There is a rational explanation for everything. There is also an irrational one. "
The massive amounts of data they were talking about were being pushed to other servers, so they could have done that work with a hard drive.
You said "servers", plural, so you should have also said "hard drives", plural.
Doing the same job with a hard drive might've taken a really long time, worn out a ton of philips screwdrivers, and required physical access to a lot of places where physical access is unauthorized.
Spamhaus Don't Route or Peer
abilena.podolsk-mo.ru isn't resolving for me right now, but DROP list is worth using.
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
You've got a good point, but clearly it CAN work in some cases.
For example, take driver's licences. It should be the same situation you're describing, with the government refusing to hand them out to people it doesn't like and all that, yet clearly, that's not happening: pretty much everyone who wants a driver's licence can get one (and for those who can't, the problem is not a refusal of the government to issue a licence).
I still don't think the GP is right, not at all - he's way over the top, and even if the idea WAS good, it wouldn't work since it'd require immediate total cooperation from every nation on the planet at once -, but you're painting with too broad a brush as well.
BFD. Perhaps ISPs will start A) having a use policy that prohibits this kind of activity (most already do), B) they will actually enforce it, and C) they'll check into what kind of customer they're going to have before signing them up.
If ISPs get wary about accepting major new customers without first checking into the experience at previous ISPs, good. If ISPs are frightened about their financial future if they mistakenly accept a spammer into their service, good. If ISPs adopt draconian, "pull the plug first, before the damage is done" policies if spammers ever do make a home on their servers, good.
Heck, when people rent an apartment it isn't uncommon for the landlords to request a reference. ISPs need to stop assuming that because someone hands over the money in advance for some huge amount of bandwidth, it won't matter to the rest of their service if the renter is the equivalent of a crack dealer and the last apartment the customer rented was trashed or burned to the ground.
No, I don't have any sympathy for ISPs that sign up customers "no questions asked" or who don't enforce their own policies until the violation is acute. And if an ISP does run their business that way, they better charge those customers A LOT of money for that kind of discretion, and if the customer causes huge problems anyway, well, that's the kind of business risk you chose to make.
You make it sound like an ISP that suffers because of the activity of their customers is some innocent victim. No, they are complicit either by getting paid off to look the other way or because they were negligent to the point it put their business at risk. It's called bad management.
ISPs at that level don't really work like your home DHCP setup, you know. They probably own their own IP blocks, and can route them through whatever provider they choose.
Make it last by trying to shut down the server to which we have the IP adress resolved to that server. Come on people it's not rocket science? Just keep doing what you did the first time, until they give up.
Yes its fun to blame the Russians but don't forget we have U.S. carriers that help facilitate them (I am looking at you RETN and your connections in Los Angeles) Even more entertaining then the gifts we recieve from Russia and the delivery system propped up by U.S. companies is the shell game that is played with the networks responsible. Forget the concept of a multiheaded monster, it is all heads and no body(the alternative to that analogy is pretty gross).
Ethics ARE more important than legality.
Personal ethics should prevent you from doing any number of things that are both legal and unethical. And to jump directly to Godwin here: personal ethics should have prevented citizens of Nazi Germany from performing their legally required duty of turning Jews over to the SS.
If your personal ethics don't trump your "legal obligations" then you don't have any.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
Posting Anon to maintain my moderation but...
This wasn't a generic ISP doing this - they were ACTIVELY assisting the malware operators and not just botnet guys either. Their IPs were well known to host malicious content as well as serve as VPN endpoints to servers elsewhere controlling botnets. When a complaint was properly filed against sites in their subnet their MO was to placate the complaining individual with emails to the effect that action was going to be taken - and then move the content in question to another IP block also owned and operated by the SAME company!
So in your landlord analogy the police - to include feds - ignore your reports of crime including video tapes of the activity. Meanwhile the landlord tells you that yes it's a BIG problem and he'll fix it - by promptly moving the tenant to another apartment in the same building. Oh and it wasn't just one tenant it was dozens and dozens of them.
Your argument against being a vigilante (which I've modded up as it's a good point to make) here would hold more water if you could cite even ONE legitimate client of these people. So far I've yet to hear of ANY business screaming about having been put offline along with the crap dealers. Has anyone?
BLKMGK
Great... you made me crash Wikipedia.
Drugs are a demand driven problem; attacking supply centers simply leads to more supply popping up.
But if there wasn't a supply in the first place, there wouldn't be a demand problem... or so goes the logic.
So to use your own analogy of the War on Drugs from earlier, if we were to spray all the coca fields in Columbia with herbicides and eliminate or at least cut back cocaine production, the cocaine problem would go away? Hah, hell no it wouldn't, people WANT cocaine, that's why its worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Nobody WANTS spam in their inbox. drugs have an actual demand, spam does not, therefore, decreasing the supply of spam does not automatically mean an increase in price. Go back to ECON 101
And this morning I noticed a 5 fold increase in spam here, drat!
Fundamentally, the argument that people keep siding with is "it's okay to nuke an ISP that harbors spammers." This argument is made on emotion -- the frustration we all share about receiving spam and it's negative impact.
They weren't exactly nuked. They violated the contract and Terms of Usage of their upstream ISP. So, their ISP voided their contract. What's wrong with that? It's well within their legal and moral rights. In fact, it's the right thing to do.
I'm not sure why non-spammers would use such an ISP in the first place. And if some innocent users do get cut off, they can easily move to another ISP, can't they? After all - they aren't spammers.
... and then they built the supercollider.
If I, as a customer, say "allow port 80 and 443 outbound 24x7, IRC ports in and out 4PM-1AM and 6AM-8AM M-F + weekends, 25 only within the ISP's Walled Garden, ftp main 24x7 ftp data only when ftp main active, all other ports blocked 24x7" then no matter what virus gets on my computer, it can't send through port 25 to anywhere but your server and it can't connect to IRC bot-rooms while I'm at work or in the wee hours of the morning.
It can't connect to the bot-room IRC server? Sure it can; if you're going to allow port 80 outbound 24x7, I'm going to run my C&C server on port 80. Simple as that. For bonus points, I'll do it on port 443 and use encrypted traffic, so that the ISP couldn't tell that traffic from legit HTTPS traffic.
I was assuming the bot-room would be using a "regular" IRC network, not one that could easily be blacklisted by an ISP. Is your ISP more likely to blacklist known.dangerous.machine or irc.majorircnetwork.net?
Yes, if the adversary controls the destination machine and it is under the radar of those who control ISP-level blacklisting, then it can disguise itself as routine traffic quite easily.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
But if there wasn't a supply in the first place, there wouldn't be a demand problem... or so goes the logic.
There is neither logic nor common sense applicable to that argument (regarding illegal drugs). First, on a practical level, a sustained 100% effective prohibition has never been implemented (that I know of), and it would need to be sustained for the lifetime of anyone who had used those particular substances (i.e., the risk/dependency/addiction does not go away although it can be indefinietly suppressed). On a theoretical level, people take drugs for reasons beyond 'getting hooked', 'peer pressure', etc. Pain management is one reason not likely to go away. Others are escapism or just a desire to 'party'. Ergo, prohibition is a manage-the-issue approach not a solve-the-issue approach. Some problems deserve a manage-the-issue approach - e.g., - DUI. We won't prohibit the "D" or the "UI" but only joining of the two on public roads.
Okay, more seriously though -- if spam wasn't profitable nobody would be doing it. My comparison of the two is based on how people are attacking the problem, not the source of the problem.
"SPAM" can be profitable as an issue and a business without sending spam being effective or profitable. By way of example, much of our spam is people wanting to sell email lists. They claim these are targeted, opt-in lists (almost 100% invariably, a falsehood). This is a person marketing (spamming) to people who themselves may have a desire to market and/or spam. I.e., this is B2B spam. They may be profitable sellings lists of addresses.*** Were we to buy their services and implement accordingly, then we may lose money on it, get disconnected from our ISP, see our email and IPs blacklisted, etc. Our reputation could be tarnished causing the loss of big customers. So, it is entirely possible for the initial spammer to make $1000 selling a list or service while our $ten-million biz goes out business. Does that make spam profitable?! In a microcosm. Just like the rich-long-lost-Nigerian uncle approach works with a vanishingly small % of the population. However, the profitablility doesn't matter until people know - all people know - that spam is the path to ruin. If you already live in ruin - rich, Nigerian uncle - then this approach won't work. More of our SPAM that servives the automatic filters is B2B. IMO, it is the worst, most vile SPAM. It is also the low-hanging fruit of the problem. It could be stopped or greatly reduced by a change in our culture and laws (e.g., repeal CAN-SPAM which would let private individuals sue spammers again).
*** It is also possible the profitable aspect is one link up the chain. E.g., there is a lot money in selling selling. I.e., back in the mail-order era, you could buy a great business plan for $20. The plan amounts to little more than sell the plan you just bought. I.e., it is a non-pyramid ponzi scheme. Some people will always profit by being more persuasive, but on net, it is a losing proposition.
Not troll. Totally agree. Please mod up +1.10^10000.
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
Filesharing and botnet operation are hardly equally evil.
That depends on one's point of doesn't it?