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Bredolab Botnet Taken Down
Leon Buijs writes "Monday a 27-year-old Armenian was arrested at request of the Dutch authorities. The Dutch police think he is the brain behind the infamous, 30 million infected computers large Bredolab network, that was taken down by their Team (in Dutch) High Crime. Bredolab was used to spread virii and spam via the Netherlands. While taking the botnet down at a Dutch ISP, the suspect did several attempts to regain control. When this didn't work out, he did a DDoS attack on the ISP's servers using a 220,000 computers botnet. However, this was also broken off by taking 3 servers offline that the Armanian used for this, in Paris."
to anyone else willing to take them.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
In before everyone else: there is no such word as 'virii'.
If we can prove beyond reasonable doubt that he is indeed the mastermind behind all this, I say we make a spectacle of him.
Hang him, and broadcast it on all networks at prime time. Have his remains rot at the rope for a few weeks, with daily updates on the news.
Perhaps that would deter others. This has got to stop.
"Infected machines remain pox-ridden but the command system associated with the cybercrime network has been decapitated, following an operation led by hi-tech police in The Netherlands."
I would say the Dutch police are getting ahead of the cyber-criminals.
That guy should know that botnets are not the way to get ahead in life.
It's a shame he wasn't more headstrong, he'll never be the head of a major corporation.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Dutch news is bringing this as if the police has taken down the whole botnet while in fact they've only taken down the servers that were controlling it. I'm not surprised if the botnet is already up and running again, controlled from a new location.
for educational purposes only?
Yours In Osh,
Kilgore Trout
Thats what I thought. Dumpster Bill and Chair-thrower should be right behind this guy on the chain-gang.
Lulz. One dictionary, and not a very deep one at that.
If I created a botnet, then used it to force all the computers to run Folding@Home. Would I still be evil?
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
Seems like a new infamous 30million host botnet pops up every day.
Words are not made plural by adding two letter "i"s. Doing that makes you look really ignorant.
... I would like to hear about how some brilliant hacker took control of 3 million computers and used to all that computing power to, say, find a cure for cancer instead of just pissing everybody off.
Here's the deal. Back in the old west, horse staling was a capital crime. You didn't even need to be a real law enforcement officer to string someone up for stealing a horse!
Why was that? We don't knock off every car thief today, so why such harsh tratment for horse thieves? Two simple factors:
1. Horses were HUGELY important to the old west economy!
2. Stealing a horse is REALLY easy!
So... They made stealing a horse a capital crime as a strong deterrent to protect the business model from an otherwise trivial act.
See any Paralells???... The only way to deter hacking is to make the punishment much more severe than it is now. I'm not saying firing squad is the way to go for this guy, but something really bad.
Any Suggestions???
...Many more to go
Fix the Whois!
Franck Martin
Avonsys
What's new (for me at least), is that the authorities informed over 100,000 computer users of their infection/participation via an ISP by redirecting them to a warning published here by the dutch police. Not sure if that's common policy or something we'll see more often.
...a fact which for the sake of a quiet life most people tend to ignore ~H2G2
Not High Crime, but Team High Tech Crime.
Yes, mod me down or delete the comment after the spellerror has been corrected please.
4chan reports 30 million members suddenly went inactive and operation payback has slowed to a crawl...
Dutch is fine by me, but the average /.er might want to check the (short) facts here: http://www.om.nl/actueel/nieuws-_en/@154346/wanted_botnet/
Somewhere I read that /. had a slogan "News for nerds". This is nerd-language for a special kind of nerds. But, I do not encourage you to do much more research on this subject on the Internet without having your security fixes and system security at maximum. A small sub-culture uses this word because of practical reasons. Virii has no singular form, only a plural one. This tells you something about the definition of the word: It is infact a category that defines software and practices associated with a broad range of malicious software, and accompanied software to make such digital attacks. It is obvious that you should have your computer updated with latest patches and good security software before you visit too many sited mentioning this term.
Source:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=virii
Most words are not made plural by changing "us" to two "i"s. Doing that makes you look really ignorant only to people who are really ignorant of linguistics.
FTFY
From reading the summary I found it mildly amusing that the "Team High Crime" that found this botnet was in the Netherlands, with the agency abreviated to THC.
next you'll be trying to tell us that beeeeotchae isn't the proper plural of interweb spelling NAZI
Yes, because pedantry and slavish worship of Tom Christiansen is more important than providing a search-engine friendly way to distinguish between biological viruses and computer virii .
When did computer geeks become completely incapable of basic logic?
We spelled it byte and not bite for goddamned reason, you know.
I'll get modded flamebait, I suppose. Here's a translation for people who can't understand that a separate concept is best delineated by a separate word.
Marklar, because marklar and marklar marklar of Marklar is more marklar than providing a marklar marklar marklar to distinguish between marklar and marklar .
Hamstring him, dip him in gravy and drop him in a pit filled with starving chihuahuas. Of course if he were a SPAMMER we would need to consider something harsh.
Bot-herders are a sub-species of lowlife scum humanity that could all disappear overnight and not be missed at all tomorrow.
This guy should be locked away until the day computers become so smart that none of them will cooperate with him anymore.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Yes, the Firing Squad.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
People infected are forwarded to the following page: http://teamhightechcrime.nationale-recherche.nl/nl_infected.php
I think this is the right thing to do. And if it is not legal, it should be made into the law.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Here Here... String 'em up I say!
Keep passing the open windows...
Allow their genetic material to be used to the advancement of neuro-feedback computing and 'living hardware'.
Myyyyy, what a pretty brain you have....
http://www.onelook.com/?w=virii
That page is just a collection of links. The target references say it is either "proscribed", "nonstandard", or slang, or that the term can't be found. This link is not proof of dictionary acceptance of the term.
The correct Latin plural would probably be virera.
I believe you mean virora. Yes, this is one proposed likely candidate. Like corpus corpora or genus genera. Another candidate is virs ("veer ooz", as opposed to "veer oose" for virus), like manus mans (meaning hand hands). [Some of these characters might not be displayed in your browser.] I have not seen "virera" before, however.
The implication of the "would probably be" part of your sentence is important. We don't have any record of actual plural use of the Latin word virus, so we just don't know what the proper Latin pluralization is. Indeed, also, as you point out, it is a mass noun like "water" or "furniture", which means you would say "much virus" rather than "many virora" or "many virs".
we use it for "microphage"
Viruses are not microphages. That's something else.
Dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive.
Not all dictionaries are descriptive only. Dictionaries can also be prescriptive. Sophisticated dictionaries often include usage notes which relate the opinions of usage panels, and as such are prescriptive, or are, at the very least, advisory.
I would recommend folks not use 'viri' or 'virii' in any non-joke context.
I feel it is important to keep in mind that English is pretty fucked up and that humanity suffers "heat loss" because of English's inefficiency. (Not to belittle the problem here -- inefficiency can be more than mere annoyance or inconvenience. Inefficiency can manifest as harmful misunderstandings or needless conflict.) Part of what makes English bad in this way is irregularity. Imagine trying to learn a new language and having to memorize "good / better / best" instead of just learning "good" and knowing the comparative ("gooder") and the superlative ("goodest"). Sounds like not a big deal, but that's only one example, and you're spending time and effort learning this needless irregularity. Irregularity wastes time and makes communication slower and more problematic.
I have a friend who says she "paints with words like an impressionist". This is lovely for many things, but I would rather a person not do this for relating a recipe for baking, or the schedule for an event, or directions to a venue, or how somebody was badly injured in an accident or a fight. Getting ideas shared clearly between people is hard enough as it is. I would recommend erring on the side of precision in communication. One problem with painting with words like an impressionist, or "[resorting] to poetry", can be that a person may opt for or default to the more comfortable and less precise mode of communication because it's easy, and they may never train to be able to be more precise. Paint with words if you feel it's for the best for the situation at hand, but don't neglect to learn to use pencils and rulers, and to apply them when it's better to.
Be grammatically correct when you can. It helps.
Now, computer viruses are not Roman inventions. Or Greek. (That's something else.)
If we think of "virus" as coming from Latin rather than being a proper Latin term, then we can think of it as an English term, a new English word, in the shape of some old language's word. Virus means something different to us than what it did to Romans. We don't think virus means "poison" but instead "a computer program". And in English we use virus as a count noun, not a mass noun: Your network has many viruses, it does not have much virus. You might want to avoid pluralizing that old Latin word and
Yes offcourse my american friend... *calls french daycare centre*
Horse staling as in horse stalling? :P Tratment? :P
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Force him to use an unpatched XP machine for 30 minutes. He'll either kill himself or swear off technology for good.
Shift happens. Fire it up.
Repairing what you have broken, in double, seems fair to me. So, have him repair twice as many computers as he has broken, clean twice the amount of spam he sent, etc.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Except it wasn't business models. An individual who had his horse stolen in the old west would be pretty well screwed in general and might have to resort to crime. That and they didn't have a supermax to send people to, pretty much the sentence would have to either be measured in days or they kill you. Finally, if the law didn't kill the horse thief, the people would do it anyway and then the sheriff loses all credibility.
I'm all for strong laws to deal with organized commercial abuse of other people's machines including botnets and spam but that must be tempered with rather narrow laws and broad exceptions so we don't start treating mere errors of youth as if they were crimes against humanity. We also need to make sure eager beaver prosecutors can't attack security consultants engaging in legitimate contracted security testing (even if it gets out of hand).
The number of excuses to spy on your computer communications has just gained another powerful argument. I would rather have it that the population had an excuse to monitor the government communications.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Wow...just another good reason this dude should be getting a sweet job. I'm sure after all this someone will consider that resume.
ANY email source is a non-trusted source. I don't know how many times I've heard "well, yes I got the message not to open attachments, especially not cards, but *THIS* card came from my Aunt Betsy, and SHE would NEVER send me a virus"
Well no, Aunt Betsy probably wouldn't send you a virus, but the infection that was on her computer sniffing entries out of her address book certainly would. Oh, and those emails from billgates@microsoft.com probably aren't legit either, being that email sources are ridiculously simple to spoof...
Make like he is getting hired by this well known security company, leading edge in tech. He is asked to dress up, but they rush him through all levels of interviews (he's special), till the final one, where the boss asks him, with a hushed voice, what was your best accomplishment. The boss listens, then pushes a button and the cops come and cuff him.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Never liked stale horses.
I say we offer him a vastly reduced sentence IF (and only IF) he provides enough valid information about others involved in the botnet to lead to more arrests. If he does not share the info, hit him with the full force of the law. Lock him up and throw away the key. Oh and a ban on ever using anything that counts as a "computer" for the rest of his life. Threats of life in jail might make him more likely to give up whoever he was working with (more to the point, the money men involved)
Regardless of what happens, this conviction needs to be made public in a big way. This thing should be HEADLINE NEWS. If this thing is made public, it should increase public awareness of the fact that there are nasty people out there doing nasty things to your computer and that you need to do something about it and thats a good thing.
That's an easy question to answer. Make the guy personally responsible for cleaning up the mess he made.
Simple.
How about arguing that "octopi" is wrong. Since the root of octopus is greek, not latin?
Or just move on with life.
So the plural of virus is... virus..
Yes, in Latin. But we are discussing English, not Latin.
In English, the word "virus" is a loanword from Latin and, as with many loanwords, we use the native [English] language's inflectional morphology, not that of the originating language [Latin]. Thus in English, "virus" is a countable noun whose plural inflection uses the morpheme "-s" (with the particular allomorph "-es") as "viruses".
Also, the Latin word "virus" translates to English "poison", not English "virus", at least until relatively recent Latin discourse on the concept English now describes with "virus"; Latin "died" long before germ theory, and long before the meaning of English "virus" shifted from the cognate of Latin "virus" to a false friend.
If English speakers want to use their borrowed noun to describe a countable idea, they shouldn't let the (putative) fact that the originating language didn't inflect it as a plural limit their expressiveness. We should speculate that the use of "virus" as a countable noun in modern English comes from users of modern English wishing to talk about individual virions, or about computer programs (in the abstract, as opposed to individual instantiations). For the same reason, modern users of Latin should also inflect the word as a plural if they wish to use the word to mean the same thing it means in modern English. (Why someone would want to use Latin in this way is another issue. The replacement of Latin by French and German, and then English, as de facto lingua franca came about precisely because dead languages lack the power to express novel discourse.)
Inflecting nouns with number adds information to language, increasing its expressive power. The communication is clearer and more reliable if the target of the communication doesn't have to disambiguate the number (or general sense) of a word from context. In other words, yes we certainly should use countable nouns to describe countable ideas and let only "natural" uncountability, not linguistically officious shoulder shrugging, determine the uncountability of our nouns.
Why stop at the old west for our standards of morality and sound judgement? Let's go all the way back to Leviticus. Cheat on your wife? Death! Like other dudes? Death! Bang both your wife and her mom? Death for everybody!
... but he is still the victim. Save your ire for the perp.
Yay!...Finally some cyber spooks that actually are able to bypass what the hackers do when they are trying to regain control...hearing this gives me hope...either the cops got smart and hired ex hackers, and told them something about their cred being on the line as real hackers could avoid being Ddos...and then watched them bypass the botnet hackers attempts to regain control....what ever they did, they should keep doing it...and many more!
Kill everybody who says "boxen" instead. ;-)
virii: "Mai cumpyootor can haz much vairus."
viruses: "My computer has viruses."
The problem with any computer crime is you can NEVER prove it. And the "forensic" evidence is total bullshit. The computer forensics people like to say that the defendants in crimes basically make shit up and that you can prove it. No you can't. You aren't connecting evidence to a physical real person. The evidence can and is tampered with all the time. Now they are right in that tell-tale signs exist most of the time- but not always. For instance if someone copied a bunch of files from a GNU/Linux live-cd to the Internet Explorer Temporary Internet Files folder to plant evidence (like a cop- and they do) you would immediately notice that they all have dates and times impossibly close together. Sadly trying to defend yourself in these situations is allot of work. I'm just glad I've never had to do it.