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Rustock Botnet Responsible For 40% of Spam
angry tapir writes "More than 40 percent of the world's spam is coming from a single network of computers that computer security experts continue to battle, according to new statistics from Symantec's MessageLabs' division. The Rustock botnet has shrunk since April, when about 2.5 million computers were infected with its malicious software that sent about 43 billion spam e-mails per day. Much of it is pharmaceutical spam."
Hunt them down and kill them all
Please
Much of it is pharmaceutical spam.
A very particular kind of pharmaceutical.
First and foremost, don't expect ANY help from the "security" companies like Symantec and the like, SOLVING this problem would mean the end to their extortion business.
And, don't expect ANY help from the "white hats" in general, all they can do is walk in circles pontificating about how it would be unethical to hack these networks and bring them down.
So really, the only solution is the possibility of someone with "black hat" skilz that wants to be paid to take the system down outside the "law".
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Is it to order some of their crap. Track down where the money goes.
And kill them.
We've spent more doing less millions of times... Why don't we get around to fixin this problem?
This is like the corporate/university computers that re-image themselves every night against the central server, deleting anything that changed on the hard disk. That would be an awesome feature for a dumb web-surfing box for the idio---parents. Would be a little bit of a pain for everyone else, but we can avoid getting infected, right?
"Maybe what we need are a few good old fashioned hangings." -- Commissioner Orson Swindell, Federal Trade Commission
at the first FTC spam conference.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
You can fairly easily set it up so that when machines reboot, all changes are lost. It's convenient for a lot of applications.
If the FBI was half as interested in nailing fraud as it was in doing the RIAA's bidding, they would create fake credit card accounts and order the spamvertized products themselves. Then they can trace the transactions back and get the merchant accounts frozen.
"Us Ubuntu and Mac users will not give you peace nor rest until Windows is dead"
Good luck with that. Of course once OUR Windows is dead it'll be YOUR machines sending us SPAM.
Yeah, you know what? You may be right, but in the mean time...
Because, you see, whatever MY potential for causing YOU harm in the future (and I admit it's non-zero), the likelihood that the overwhelming majority of the millions of machines in this botnet right now are running Windows has a probability of 1. So maybe if WE stopped speculating about some future email Armageddon and focused on the one that's happening right now, we might actually get something done.
And who knows? Maybe the lessons you learn by cleaning up this mess will help us all avoid it in the future? Now wouldn't that be nice?
Nicer than your reply, anyway, which is the rhetorical equivalent of 'Yo' Momma!'
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
>Good luck with that. Of course once OUR Windows is dead it'll be YOUR machines sending us SPAM.
No it won't. The "windows gets targeted only because it's biggest" argument is a fallacy - and an easily debunked one at that.
Here's the REAL reason why you will never see much spams or trojans in the Linux world. Unlike our windows counterparts, when we need an app for some task, we don't open a (insecure) browser, search around, find a .exe which we then RUN to install the program.
We connect to a repository, which is run by software experts who have repackaged and tested the programs in question, the software gets downloaded automatically - the files are checked using digital signatures to prevent MitM attacks, and only then installed.
Average computer users will never have the capacity of computer experts to tell trojans from useful apps, and either way have no viable means of determining if a particular install file is trustworthy without having already taken the risk, all while dealing with a browser/email combination that could do all this without them even being aware of it (though at least that has gotten better than it used to - remember I-Love-You, that's how bad Outlook once was!).
Us GNU/Linux users pool our resources to have people who are skilled select and evaluate the apps in our repositories and make our selection from a set that's pre-vetted. We can choose on features and design without having to WORRY about "does it coincidentally install spyware which will later be installing a botnet", because the people who packaged the software have nothing to gain by not removing such, and everything to benefit from ensuring the trustworthiness of the software.
Remove the capacity to write "installer programs" for windows - create a repository (perhaps even a paid one - like Apple's app-store) and you solve the botnet problem. Trouble is, Microsoft unlike the GNU/Linux companies won't find the best way to keep their repo profitable is to be open to all comers who write useful software. Much like Apple, they'll end up using it to make sure nothing i available to their users that competes with their own products.
The cure may be even worse than the disease - so I don't know if it's something to push for. What I can tell you is, as long as ordinary users are supposed to vet good from bad software (people who have ZERO training in how to tell the difference in other words) - botnets WILL proliferate. The problem isn't even so much OS-design (though it plays a role), it's the way software is managed on the two platforms.
GNU/Linux simply has a software management concept that is by it's very nature far, far more secure than Windows. It's not perfect - last year Fedora's repos were pwned temporarily - and they had to create and issue a full set of new keys to ensure the integrity of what they contained - but the problem was fixable without any customer ever being at risk. That's what GNU/Linux's repository concept does - it takes the task of risk assessment and gives it to people who are trained at for the job so by definition they do it better.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Because statistically speaking, if they have one virus, they probably have thirty.
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