Slashdot Mirror
Researchers Take Down Koobface Servers
splitenz notes the first actions in the war against the Koobface botnet, taken on the heels of a comprehensive report (PDF) on the operations of the botnet and the criminal gang behind it. The researchers who analyzed Koobface are the same ones who brought Ghostnet to light. "Security researchers, working with law enforcement and Internet service providers, have disrupted the brains of the Koobface botnet.The computer identified as the command-and-control server used to send instructions to infected Koobface machines was offline late Friday (US Pacific time). Criminals behind the botnet made more than $US2 million in one year. Facebook accounts are used to lure victims to Google Blogspot pages, which in turn redirect them to Web servers that contain the malicious Koobface code. This action is only a stage in the war against Koobface."
I'm not sure how they did this exactly, but I'm pretty sure they didn't do it with the SQLNinja hacker tool from Fedora.
Awesome job guys.
Qxe4
Those people need to be kicked off the net until they can demonstrate that they can play nicely with the rest of us.
Although the BOFH in me would like that, thoroughly fining them would be enough. And if we really had a law that would allow to ban people from the net for incompetence, how long would it take that it would be abused to cut off government critical voices and the like? Or some evil corp gets the machine of a critical blogger infected and he's offline. Not with me.
It may be reasonable to start doing something against the bots but "no holds barred" is never justified. "Fighting fire with fire" just burns everything down.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Why were people running a "flash player update" from a third party web site they got to from Facebook?
They are used to seeing the "you need the latest flash to view this content, click here to install it now". Sure when it's done the "normal" way the executable they randomly install will come from Adobe, but the entire process is begging for this tomfoolery.
To those who can't guess, I use Linux, won't install anything from Adobe and use noscript in the browser so forgive me if the "official" process has changed from the above idiotic implementation.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
If we're not willing to us a "no holds barred" approach to attacking the spam bot issue, well, you better just get used to more and more spam.
I'm working on crossing a Predator Drone with traceroute. Right now it's more like 'Tron' meets the 'A-Team' but it's still in the development phase. I'll let you know when I'm ready to test it ;-)
In particular because vigilantes have a bad reputation when it comes to correctly identifying targets and having a low occurrence of collateral damage. You get people who very much have the crusader mentality who get convinced of their own righteousness and infallibility. It leads to problems, it leads to innocents getting caught up on a large scale. Whenever you ahve to start up with "The ends justify the means," it generally means that they in fact don't.
That is why I have been saying for ages the most common software like Flash, along with updates to drivers like NV and ATI, should come through Windows Update. But sadly every Joe Schmo company that didn't get included would scream "antitrust!". What I've found to work in the meantime with clueless users is simply tell them "If a site says you need to update Flash or Java or whatever, go here, put checkboxes on what you need, then run it". Ninite has all the most common like Flash, Silverlight, .NET, Java, as well as browsers, media players, KLite Codec pack for those that get the "you need codecs to play" problem, pretty much anything they need.
I tell them if the site still demands they install something after running Ninite it is a virus and should be ignored and avoided. It does help to cut down on the clueless ones whose machines I don't have direct access to. For those I DO have access to I have Update Checker installed and running in the background so they KNOW if Filehippo don't tell them there is an update there is NO update. Everyone makes fun of the "stupid" users, but really nobody can know everything and some of these sites are damned hard to tell from real. Giving the clueless a few tools such as this really helps cut down the infections, although I think windows Update doing it would be even better.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.