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Attack Toolkits Dominating the Threat Landscape
wiredmikey writes "The ease-of-use and ability to amass great profits through the use of easily accessible 'attack toolkits' are driving faster proliferation of cyber attacks and expanding the pool of attackers, opening the doors to more criminals who would likely otherwise lack the required technical expertise to succeed in the cybercrime underground. The relative simplicity and effectiveness of attack kits has contributed to their increased use in cybercrime — these kits are now being used in the majority of malicious Internet attacks."
....as opposed to those bothersome benevolent ones... Low orbit ion cannons at the ready!
Script kiddies aren't smart enough to code their own exploits. They rely on other people to release their code and then use / abuse it.
It's like PHP; the fact that it's very easy to use leads to a lot of crappy code, even though there are real programmers using it who know what they're doing.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
The real hackers write the toolkits and then distribute them to kids like this who then get in trouble and get caught. Once caught, they occupy all the "cyber law enforcement" people's time they have to "protect" us and then the real hackers go about their way unnoticed and never caught. The internet is awash with people calling themselves 'hackers' while a very low percentage 1) actually investigate ways to hack systems and 2) never let their identities and preferably actions known for obvious reasons. It's obvious that they offer up a toolkit to let idiots run around painting targets on themselves so they can mess around unhindered.
My work here is dung.
News Flash: The proliferation of manufactured weapons is credited with a rise in use amongst those with limited training in the use of weapons. Also, technology is making things previously difficult to do easy, says spokesperson for Captain Obvious.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Yes, but when you fire a shotgun at a burglar you can be pretty sure that he hasn't had his brain hijacked to believe he's planting bugs to find out if his wife is cheating on him (when in reality, he's been living alone for the past few years in a run-down one-room apartment). The malware is "served up" from hacked sites and botnets, so you risk disabling a critical system. Reliable "counter malware" that isn't custom-tailored to the specific version of a specific bot would require you to kill the networking of the whole host.
If you don't believe me on that, just think about why/how antivirus doesn't just "remove the malware from the system" simply. Not to mention that it's unfeasible to expect this to work long, because malware are small pieces of software that can be hardened against exploits easily, and "stealing" them by spoofing their communications protocol also relies on the protocol being insecure.
Emotions! In your brain!
It's great that the boys over at Symantec have found out that there are malware toolkits on the interwebs.
Maybe next they will develop a program that will remove viruses and other malware without breaking computers or, as I've seen, forcing customers to call India tech support who charg $90 to remove those extra special tough ones.
Then the next step will be to do that without bringing the computers to a crawl.
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
Very glad to live in a society where people don't have or want that 'right', but leave it to law enforcement, and having murder by firearm and accedential death by firearm at a fraction of US rate (you have a few alternatives to pick from here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate)
Most first-world countries have lower 'knife-related death rates' than America too.
Americans just kill each other far more often than most other first world countries, and most of those murders are fights between drug dealers. Guns are pretty much irrelevant to the murder rate, and someone who's determined to murder someone doesn't much care about gun laws anyway.
Plus I notice you picked 'death rate' rather than 'murder rate', which presumably includes sucides. Obviously people are more more likely to use a gun to kill themselves in countries where guns are readily available; hence, for example, the oft-repeated claim that American cops are far more likely to be killed with their own gun than use it to kill a criminal.