Slashdot Mirror
Anti-US Hacker Takes Credit For Worm
angry tapir writes "Credit for the "Here You Have" worm (recently discussed on Slashdot), has been taken by a hacker known as 'Iraq Resistance' who says the worm was designed, in part, as a propaganda tool. He said he had not expected the worm to spread as broadly as it had, and noted that he could have done much more damage to victims. 'I could smash all those infected but I wouldn't,' said the hacker. 'I hope all people understand that I am not negative person!' In other parts of the message, he was critical of the US war in Iraq. For a brief period early the worm accounted for about 10 percent of the spam on the Internet."
I can understand his message, but unfortunately this sort of things always backfires. I'm not sure how he thinks a virus is going to convince the super patriotic Luddites who support the war that their beliefs are totally wrong.
Where do they get that? Plenty of Americans with functioning synapses say the same damn thing about the Iraq Clusterfuck, and Terry Jones *IS* a fucking troglodyte.
I mean, okay... There's not really any excuse for releasing malicious code on anyone, so he gets no pass there. But if the only communication from him and info about him is from that video... shit, he addresses "Americans" more rationally then the two sides of the idiot aisle do each other.
This guy is just another Spam king Profiteering. He is trying to spin a political message on top of the spam but that's about it.
Seriously a bunch of consultants are about to become filthy rich.
If his plan was to slowly bleed the US to death with enormous security consulting fees, I suspect his plan will be a success.
Two points:
"I could smash all those infected but I wouldn't..."
I personnaly find it _amazing_ that none of the worm writer so far used them to destroy the computers. Really, that must be tempting, isn't it? Hundred of thousands of computer that you wipe with the push of a button.
If his payload was something *OTHER* than spam I might be more inclined to believe him, but delivering spam to people usually also involves delivering money to his bank account. He is just looking for a nobler purpose to game some "cred" I guess, and opposing the Iraq war in the cracker community is 99% of the time a pretty safe bet.
Monstar L
This guy sounds like a drunk I saw getting arrested at a club recently. He tried to throw a punch at a bartender, got tackled by club security, then started screaming that he deliberately didn't hit hard or wasn't trying to aim accurately as he was being held down for the local police to haul him off.
This worm writer was too incompetent to actually have done more damage. I'm sure he was trying to, but because IT people and AV makers reacted to it in a fairly short amount of time, he is just excusing it as he didn't hit hard enough.
And what did this get mr "Iraq Resistance"? Nothing. This guy is nothing more than a glorified script kiddie that would have gotten kickbanned from any meaningful IRC channel the second he typed in his first line of text.
Maybe he should go back to spamming random message boards with anti-US slogans and calling himself an uber haxx0r because he can manually type in a CAPTCHA.
"He said he had not expected the worm to spread as broadly as it had..."
Gee, we've never heard that one before...
At one point it accounted for 10% of the world's spam, but "I'm not negative person!"
Yeah, I guess he's right. There's a difference between a "negative" person and an idiot.
It's just a rip from the article, which is terribly written and fails to provide a lot of context. My initial opinion was this was a stitch up and the hacker was just against the war and people were stretching connections and definitions to make them sound like a security threat. This ComputerWorld article is way better at providing the details that link this worm to previous efforts by a Libyan hacker to create a politically motivated hacker group. To describe these guys as anti-US would be, I think, a simplification of the motivation of these groups. Jihadists (and here I also probably simplify) may be prepared to attack the States, but the motivation is not simply anti-US. I found this article on Eurozine to be really interesting on breaking down their attitudes.
I'm always amazed at how so many people can so easily fall for something that was at best a third grade attempt. Several of my coworkers and I were unhappy, to say the least, because we all took one look at the email and said that a blind man should've been able to pick up on this. And then someone chimed in with probably what was the best comment about why this happened. He suggested that it's been many years since we've seen this kind of attack go this rampant so everyone's guard was let down such that they didn't believe these attacks happened any more.
OCO is Loco
Certainly any such story on /. should point out the affected operating systems...
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
I'm not a burglar either - I was just breaking into your house and messing it up to show you how unsecure the locks are.
Just because the worm author makes statements agains the US war in Iraq and calls himself "Iraqi resistance" does not mean he is anti-US. I too am agains the war in Iraq. Is it possible to disagree with US foreign policy and not be accused of being a traitor? Yes, I know he crossed a line making a (fairly harmless) worm, but this guy sounds as much aligned with US interests as most beer-swilling, harley-riding, pit bull owning flag wavers.
Currently hooked on AMP
I wish these pussies would stop fooling around. They need to make their worms destroy all data on every computer they touch. This is the only way that anyone will ever take security seriously, including Microsoft.