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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"
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?
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.
http://www.secretservice.gov/investigations.shtml
Since 1984, the Secret Service's investigative responsibilities have expanded to include crimes that involve financial institution fraud, computer and telecommunications fraud, false identification documents, access device fraud, advance fee fraud, electronic funds transfers and money laundering as it relates to the agency's core violations.
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!
Sadly, thats incorrect, there are cases where people have been tortured and kidnapped for messing with these criminals
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/08/hacker-reported/ is one such case, another i dont have the link for right now involved a reporters daughter being kidnapped, put on drugs and sent to work in a brothel for 5 years. The hacker con ruxcon in Australia had a talk on it last year, no country is safe when dealing with real criminals. They will find and kill you for disrupting their business.
But the reverse is also true they can also be found hunted down and eradicated fumigated and deleted from the record of humanity
Really? From the article:
In April, Miami Beach police busted a ring of Bulgarian nationals ....
The Secret Service took over the Miami Beach case, and the four defendants were each released on a $100,000 cash and signature bond. Three, including alleged ringleader Nikolai Hristov Arabov, jumped bail and went on the lam last month.
That goes beyond stupidity and incompetence and possibly straight to collusion. And this isn't corruption in the ex-Soviet bloc. This is the Secret Service and our own court system.
Have gnu, will travel.
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?"