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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."
Those were never "hackers"
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."
It's the Cheese. The evil cheese...
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
Your right; the really lazy would just hire someone local to do their 'wet work'. Good thing they haven't thought of that.
Hacker make things work, generally with either with a low budget, a high degree of creativity, simple elegance, or superfluous complexity. More for the satisfaction of being able to be it. Sometimes involving good-natured pranks, naivety or a need to take dissect things just to see how they work. However a death threat is the sort of malovelence far removed from a hacker's nature. Also hackers tend to be very strongly motivated by internal rewards (satisfaction at a job well done) rather than the external (money) as these scammers are.
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.
Hack The Planet!!1
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*".
Unfortunately "hackers" is, and has been for at least the last 15 years, a term associated with "crackers". It's a shame when playful cleverness is being labelled organised crime whilst real crime in which people are being hurt and laws broken remains largely ignored by law enforcement. I wish politicians and police would come to their senses and realise that "cybercrime" and IRL crime are one and the same, and the only way you can fix it is by finding the perpetrators and slapping them with fines and jail sentences. Denial of service and XSS on their own aren't really (legal) problems. The problems start occurring when these methods are used to deliver death threats and steal data for personal gain.
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
Fortunately, the hardware hacking community has worked toward making the name its own again, ensuring that the concept of a hacker as a knowledgeable, creative person who works with complex computer technology at least somewhat lurks in the minds of the educated public.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
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.
Well, in other countries people don't eat that much cornflakes, so the US has significiant competitive advantage in shitting in cornflakes .
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?"
Fortunately, the hardware hacking community has worked toward making the name its own again, ensuring that the concept of a hacker as a knowledgeable, creative person who works with complex computer technology at least somewhat lurks in the minds of the educated public.
Now to find us some educated public!