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Aussie Blogger Hit With DDoS Death Threats
mask.of.sanity writes "An Australian blogger who blew the lid on emerging domain-name fraud campaigns has received death threats from the scammers. His blog and domain parking company are still being hit with a large distributed denial of service attack that has the death threats embedded as HTML links within its logs. Australia's government CERT team and the U.S. Secret Service (blog servers were hosted on U.S. soil) are pursuing the botnet's command and control servers. Ten days later, the victim is still being attacked and is fighting a cat-and-mouse game as IP address ranges change."
What happened to the awesome days of software sharing and music liberation, now hackers are sending death threats when their scam empire is threatened and DDoS is nearly a household term?
No, the people doing this are not going to hop on a plane,rent a car and find your house.
Unless you live in russia, then you better cut that shit out and hide.
Huh? So now domain name parkers are considered innocent victims rather than the scumbucket profiteers that polute the web and search engines with advertisings and misleading links?
Why is the United States Secret Service involved? From what I remember, the USSS is involved in matters of dignitary protection and anti-counterfeiting operations. Are the scammers involved in either of these?
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
I thought death threats were just what happens to anyone who becomes remotely famous.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Sometimes I think it's out of sheer laziness. It's not only so much easier and less involved to start a digital attack against someone, but no broken bones, in many cases you could not have police involved (especially if you're conveniently located in a country that couldn't care less), and there's the sheer laziness factor. These people may have overly active fingers from the hacking and clicking but I highly doubt they'd ever waste the calorie burn of actually taking a plane out to someone's house.
It's the Cheese. The evil cheese...
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
That's the most fucking asinine or exceedingly obtuse comment on this page yet. The threat doesn't go away when you turn the computer off. The damage of a death threat isn't in the symbols used to convey the message, but the intent it converts.
Too bad the general media don't get this idea. They are way to busy gazing at the medium is the message to understand that the medium is transitory.
The TP (Tea Party, or something for wiping you ass with) get this; they don't say anything that is explicitly racist - as an example -, but almost everything they say is inherently racist. Like a magician slipping a card, you can't pin him to what he did, but the end result is the same. It is way more McLuhan than McLuhan itself [ sorry, stolen from a stoned friend who gushed 'it is more chocolaty than chocolate itself' ]
More on opic, front-ways, to you sir, I say "*WHOOSH*".
wow dumass, not only do you fail to recognize the symbolism but you shower your uninformed opinions.
RTFA this wasn't simply some upset asshole in the Ukraine sending death threats, this was a pump and dump scam being uncovered, where they send a buttload of fake traffic to view the ads, and then run off.
If they can sue based on IP, why can't they get the names and addresses of everyone involved?
There's only one thing that will end this. Find every IP launching the attack and prosecute them for hacking, even if all they did was own an insecure system. You have to push the responsibility back on the people allowing the attacks. It's illegal to leave your car running attended because it's an attractive nuisance.
Learn to love Alaska
Tinkering aside, Gilmour considered the attacks a symptom of the endemic lawlessness of the internet and failures of law enforcement to defend its users.
“I can buy a botnet for a buck a day and put anyone out of business," he said. “Governments have done nothing over the last 10 years to this clear and present danger, save for some posturing.”
1stworldproblems. Cry me a river.
It's like people calling us Canucks instead of Canadians. Nothing mean-spirited about that... you guys are known as Aussies and it's considered a cool thing over here.
US native, but having lived in Australia for several years, I call bullshit: Poster is not Australian.
Never met an Australian yet who objected to being called an Aussie.
And yes, Australians call us 'yanks' and Britons 'poms' more often then they use the proper names.
s/Yanks/bloody Yanks/
s/Poms/bloody Poms/
s/Aussie/fair dinkum Aussie/ :D
As an Aussie I'd have to agree; the word 'Aussie' is perceived here as a generally positive term. At worst it could be seen as jingoistic. On the other hand 'yank' and 'pom' are not always meant as terms of endearment...
Yeah I forgot we come from a world of American Capitalism. If someone would pay you to shit in a little kids cornflakes you would probably do it and wonder why people think it is wrong.
I guess it is true entrepreneurial spirit to create something that adds zero value to the world so that you can make a few dollars. Who cares if it slows down legitimate users and wastes their time that could be spent enjoying their lives.
We're aussies, we call ourselves aussies, get over it mate.
These IP addresses that are now logged to have attacked this site's blog, might also have been used for clicking these ads. If these addresses are given to the advertising companies I see at least to possible steps to take:
1) Block the IP addresses from generating ad-revenue. This should save them *some* money.
2) Find out which ads has been vigorously "clicked" from these IP addresses and find out which company that gets paid for it. That would probably be a good starting point for an investigation.
Would be a great time for a vacation.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
He wrote some blog posts about other domain scammers, and they're retaliating. Awwww .... nothing to see here, folks ....
Absent from the article is a key question - how does either the "domainer" or the scammer make money? Pumping fake traffic through fake domains is usually monetized through Google AdSense.
To be the same, imagine that your house ownership expires. You might get notice that this is about to happen, but the notice looks like junk mail and might not even arrive. Fake notices are sent all the time by scammers wanting to fool you into paying the wrong person. If you are on vacation or otherwise miss the legit notice, you might not pay in time. Your house is then quietly reposessed by the local authorities. Some jerk at the courthouse buys the house instantly. (he always does this) You find yourself homeless. The jerk offers to sell you back your house for a ridiculous markup. His whole reason for buying the house was the hope that you would be desperate enough to pay him well. He has no other use for your house. He has no realistic hope that anybody else would want your custom house, and you need it because it's where everybody thinks you live.
I know Michael personally, have read his blog for a couple years, and am familiar with his meta-parking service.
He's definitely one of the parking industry's most stand up guys. He's not a domain scammer, nor anything close to that. Advertisers love his service because he cuts off anyone with bad traffic. Now he's exposing the seedy underbelly of the parking industry... which of course seems to have pissed off some people.
The scammers make money by pounding advertisers' PPC links on parked pages and getting paid, then moving on to different accounts before Google or Yahoo can charge back against the first set of accounts. The middleman (parking co or Michael's co) gets burned in the process.
are payed off by the mafia rings that run these shows.
think about Mexican drug cartels. they are known to have infiltrated the media, as well as the federal police force, and even the offices of the government. reporters have been killed.
lets not even talk about Pakistan, Russia, etc.
By allowing a domain to expire you relinquish your owner ship of it. Just about every domain I have ever let expire has been registered the instant it dropped. There is nothing wrong with this because I let the domains expire. If someone else wants to register them; they have every right to do so. Domains need to expire, otherwise we would have an exponential growth of dead/abandoned domains that could never be recovered and no revenue stream to maintain their infrastructure. Currently between 60,000 and 70,000 .com domains expire every day and become available for registration. I own plenty of domains that I would never have gotten if they didn't expire.
The same thing happens to houses. If you own a property and you leave it unattended you certainly can lose it just like a domain. Try it, buy a property and never ever check the mail pertaining to the property or do anything with it. Eventually you're guaranteed to lose that property; through failure to pay tax if nothing else.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
Yes I'm australian, so cram that bullshit call straight back up your ass.
I want none of the cringe worthy shitty true blue lables the media insists on wheeling out for that cultural feel.
Hi all,
A friend of mine mentioned that the DDOSing of my server (whizzbangsblog.com) had reached slashdot and I thought that I'd comment.
1. The problem with shutting down the server is that it's giving into the people doing the DDOS. I will never give in to a bully as they will then know that they could blackmail me in the future.
2. Domain Parking is a legitamate business and the goal of ParkLogic is to better match advertisers and traffic. Many sites only exist because of advertising dollars and providing value to advertisers is our primary concern.
3. We can't sue the owners of all the botnet infected PCs....but we would encourage everyone to have anti-virus software installed.
4. Yes, I am concerned about the death threats.....but not as concerned as my wife and children. I've never experienced anything like this before and it's a little troubling.
Regards,
Michael