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Zeus Attackers Turned the Tables On Researchers
ancientribe writes "The attackers behind a recent Zeus Trojan exploit that targeted quarterly federal taxpayers who file electronically also set up a trap for researchers investigating the attack as well as their competing cybercrime gangs. They fed them a phony administrative panel with fake statistics on the number of Zeus-infected machines, as well as phony 'botnet' software that actually gathers intelligence on the researcher or competitor who downloads it."
I'm being a bit sardonic here, but why can't we have commercial software that we pay for this well thought out? Of all the categories of software (games, utilities, Office suites), malware has evolved from being CPU/disk/memory hogs to some of the leanest and most well coded executables that ever hit a CPU on the planet.
You can't get it because you are unable or unwilling to pay top dollar for quality software that works. By contrast Botnet owners, Wall St firms, and the Chinese government are willing to pay top dollar for software which functions perfectly and reliably and indeed do so.
It should also be noted that when software companies attempt to cross such buyers by providing less than stellar product, they tend to end up regretting it. The average user by contrast keeps buying Windows, Office, Norton and DVD codec software no matter how much they get burned. The incentive to produce quality software for the general user simply doesn't exist.
May the Maths Be with you!
So, you can't trust software from malware vendors?
Why don't commercial programs have such high quality and thought out design? Simply because there's not enough money in it. The writers of these programs (the Bad Guys(TM)) make far more money on their work than legit companies do. Plus they have real reasons for being so good: stay out of the gulag. How do you think products like Norton Antivirus got to be such pieces of crap? Make what sells instead of what works. The Bad Guys(TM) have the exact opposite motivation. Make what works, and the money starts coming in. They sell to vulnerable machines and other Bad Guys(TM) and if it doesn't work well, their paycheck doesn't get very big.
In other words, big companies don't need good programming and quality checks. They have marketing departments.
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
I mean, it's creative and ridiculous on a par with bad-scifi plot twists.
Bad sci-fi? I was thinking more of a Hollywood movie. The hero, a very smart well dressed man in some secret spy agency, let's say MI6, goes after the coders. Now, after using all of his super secret gadgets to infiltrate the the hackers headquarters, he's caught. BUT one of the hackers likes him and she becomes his ally, let's call her Boobies Mucho (She's Latina). Now Boobies frees this secret agent only for both of them to get caught, tied up, and hung over a tank of mutated guppies. These guppies have big teeth! And as an added bonus, have masers strapped on their heads - that's right microwave lasers! But they escape, and this secret agent finds and sets the destruct button on all of their computers - that's right, they're Dells and it's the power buttons!
The marines show up and they have a shoot out while all the Dell's are going up in explosions! The secret agent the sleeps with the ex-hacker and we 're done.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
What makes you feel like you must hesitate to reveal that the whole Slashdot site is a fake, designed to get insightful comments from me. Everyone else is an AI, including you?
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This being Slashdot, the obvious reason is that you underinflated her...
Ha! I've outsmarted you, then. My comments are never insightful!