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Aussie Blogger Hit With DDoS Death Threats

Posted by timothy on from the bad-childhoods-continue dept.

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."

9 of 125 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Stop giving hackers a bad name! by Psychotria · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Those were never "hackers"

  2. I am confused by bloodhawk · · Score: 3, Informative

    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?

    1. Re:I am confused by North+Korea · · Score: 4, Insightful

      There's nothing wrong with domain name parking. If you have no current use for a domain you've paid, you park it. Also, you could use the domain for other purposes than just for web - like email, game servers etc. There's internet out of the web too, you know.

  3. Re:Stop giving hackers a bad name! by WorBlux · · Score: 3

    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.

  4. Re:Umm... unplug it? by WorBlux · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:Interesting. by ikkonoishi · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  6. Aren't IPs good enough to identify someone? by AK+Marc · · Score: 3, Funny

    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
    1. Re:Aren't IPs good enough to identify someone? by julesh · · Score: 4, Interesting

      If they can sue based on IP, why can't they get the names and addresses of everyone involved?

      FTFA:

      Scammers would change their origin of attack to evade blocking and Gilmour would respond in kind.

      In the last hour, the attacks have moved to Indonesia where some 28,000 unique IP addresses are attacking his sites every few minutes.

      So you're suggesting he sues 28,000 indonesians? And then when the botnet operator switches to a different IP range, another few thousand people of some other nationality. And then another, and another. And you think that's going to work because...?

      It's illegal to leave your car running attended because it's an attractive nuisance.

      Maybe where you live it is. I can assure you it isn't where I am. Which is the problem: laws work differently in different countries. Sometimes even in different regions of the same country. The Internet is international. Even if some jurisdictions have laws that you can use against attacks like this, not all do. And that just means the attackers will end up working from those that don't.

  7. Re:Internet toughguy syndrome by SteveTheNewbie · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.