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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.
Make your girl happy with your long and huge meat machine.
*link to .ru website*
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?
Find their ip address and sick 4chan on them maybe then something will get done.
Yes, it's called the internet.
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?
it would seem to me that the pharmaceutical companies that benefit from this ... should have responsibility in the computer crimes taking place here
The overwhelming majority of the "pharmaceutical" ads in questions are fraudulent. They're not actually selling Viagra. They're either selling knockoff placebos, or they're selling nothing at all, because they're just looking for naive suckers to visit a sketchy web site and cough up a credit card number or other details that can be used in identity theft schemes or similar crimes. Merck and the other actual makers of the real products would love nothing more than to shut this crap down.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
"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
Subject: Stiffy In A Jiffy
From: Erection Perfection
Nothing worthwhile ever happens before noon
No need to destroy their data. All one would have to do is replace key Windows boot files with a script that tells them that their Windows installation is hopelessly infected by viruses and has been disabled, telling them to take it to somebody who actually knows how to properly configure a Windows machine. There's no need to destroy irreplaceable data, merely to wreck Windows so badly that they have to do a full reinstall. Since that is completely beyond any of the sorts of people who are part of the problem, they would be forced to take their computers to somebody for repair, and one would at least hope that a sizable percentage of those machines would come back properly protected from viruses.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Companies like Symantec and Norton didn't start off as antivirus companies. They build tools and utilities. If by some miracle all of the botnets, trojans, and virus infections were to vanish from the world, I imagine that they would go back to making tools. It was virus makers that created the market, not Symantec and Norton.
I suppose you think cancer researchers don't really want to find a cure, because then they'd lose their funding, right?
The fact that you are marked as insightful is baffling. You have a distorted sense of reality.
I won't even bother commenting on your "white hats" criticisms, since that's been pretty well covered by others...
However, to say that *your* solution is the only solution is not only short-sighted, it's arrogant. Black Hat "skilz" must be the mystery reason why about half the number of systems are infected now, right?
There isn't a magic bullet solution that will magically fix the problem completely, aside from getting rid of the internet (and maybe humanity too!). It has to be fought on multiple fronts and incorporating multiple solutions to mitigate the problem and hopefully if it's made difficult enough or they have enough that they can lose, then maybe it will stop... but it's much more likely that we're always going to be stuck with it to at least some degree.
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.
>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 *
Soap: You what?
Tom: You take out an advert in the back page of some gay mag, advertising the latest in arse-intruding dildos. You sell it with, I dunno, "does what no other dildo can do until now", "the latest and greatest in sexual technology", "guaranteed results or your money back", all that bollocks. Now these dils cost twenty-five quid a pop - that's a snip for the amount of pleasure they're gonna give the recipients. But they send their cheques to the other company name, nothing offensive, er, "Bobbie's Bits" or something, for twenty-five quid. You take that twenty-five quid, you stick it in the bank until it clears. Now, this is the smart bit - you send back the cheque for twenty-five pound from the other company name, "Arse Tickler's Faggots Fan Club", saying we're sorry, we couldn't get the supplies from America because they ran out of stock. Now you see how many people cash that cheque - not a single soul, because who wants their bank manager to know they tickle arse when they're not paying cheques? Bacon: So how long do you have to wait until you see a return?
Tom: Probably no more than four weeks.
Bacon: A month? So, what fucking good is that if we need it in six - no, five days?
Tom: Well, it's still a good idea.
Our taxes pay agencies boasting their purported capability to do just that. If they let bot-herders proliferate for years, how are they supposed to be more efficient against terrorists not entirely dissimilar in organization (and with the first able to turn into the latter at any time by using/"renting out" their botnets as Weapons of Mass Disruption e.g. for DDoS attacks against critical infrastructures)?