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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."
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
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.
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
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
Actually, its my PROFESSIONAL duty. Good luck suing me for pointing out that you are committing a felony to your provider. I have the feds computer crimes department on speed-dial.
If a shit-ton of malicious crap and SPAM/malware are coming into MY client's network (causing ME and MY CLIENTS a material loss), or if my client's systems have been infected with a botnet controlled from YOUR IP space(a felony), it is your responsibility to address that when I tell you about it. If you don't I'll talk to YOUR provider. Or would you rather I call the FBI and tell them you're systematically attacking my client?
I don't even have to be involved actually, I can just tell MY client's providers (some of which are backbone providers) what I see coming from YOUR network and they have entire departments to deal with that type of shit. So you can fight Level 3 and Verizon for all I care. Your customers are attacking their customers, they can cut you off just as easily.
Please, dont do this.
These servers were plugged off on early monday (local moscow time), as soon we got contact with podolsk-mo. The networks of bad guys were:
62.176.16.0/22 (they got from local ISP)
91.200.144.0/22 (client's network)