The "Hail Mary Cloud" Is Growing

badger.foo writes "The Australian rickrolling of jailbroken iPhones only goes to prove that bad passwords are bad for you, Peter Hansteen points out, as he reports on the further exploits of the password-guessing Hail Mary Cloud (which we've discussed in the past). The article contains log data that could indicate that the cloud of distributed, password-guessing hosts is growing. 'With 1767 hosts in the current sample it is likely that we have a cloud of at least several thousand, and most likely no single guessing host in the cloud ever gets around to contacting every host in the target list. The busier your SSH deamon is with normal traffic, the harder it will be to detect the footprint of Hail Mary activity, and likely a lot of this goes undetected.'"

Comments

Re:What has to happen?

[Opportunist]

This is pretty much what I fear will happen eventually. Right after we'll all be equipped with "trusted" computers that will only run what we want if we jailbreak them, which will not only void their warranty but also open us up to trains of thought such as: If you didn't jailbreak and thus could only run software approved by The Powers That Are, you would not be susceptible to malware (or if, TPTA would have to take responsibility) and are thus fully liable.

Sounds far fetched? Think about it. Outlawing jailbreaking will probably not really work out, even if it was outlawed, who cares (how do you want to prosecute it)? But locked down devices that, in theory, cannot be harmful being spam chuckers will essentially mean you broke the lock. And then your lawmaker may choose, either he'll slap you for breaking the lock or, if he can't do that for some odd reason like a device that you own belonging to you, will catch you with the angle that you're causing damage with it and that can incur a hefty bill.

Don't tell me it ain't possible. If you haven't been asleep the last 10 years and when you look at the way things turned, it's anything but unlikely to become the next angle to ensure we only run what we're supposed to run.

And if at all possible, I'd like to avoid giving anyone a reason to follow that train of thought.