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Remote Admin Tools May Not Be Clever Enough For Their Own Good

Posted by timothy on from the come-into-my-parlor-said-the-spider-to-the-fly dept.

ancientribe writes "A couple of college interns have discovered that remote administration tools (RATs) often used for cyberspying and targeted cyberattacks contain common flaws that ultimately could be exploited to help turn the tables on the attackers. RATs conduct keylogging, screen and camera capture, file management, code execution, and password-sniffing, and give the attacker a foothold in the infected machine as well as the targeted organization. This new research opens the door for incident responders to detect these attacker tools in their network and fight back."

5 of 21 comments (clear)

  1. Unbelievable, software has bugs too by invisibl3 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Unbelievable, software has bugs too

    1. Re:Unbelievable, software has bugs too by Grayhand · · Score: 5, Funny

      Unbelievable, software has bugs too

      Probably a bad idea authoring spyware in Flash.

  2. news for nerds? by dutchwhizzman · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'd say nerds were aware of these flaws a long time ago. They chose not to make the whole world aware of this, since it helped catch criminals that continued to used these tools. this is probably only news for the criminals using the tools, which will probably mean that catching them will be more difficult in the future.

    --
    I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
    1. Re:news for nerds? by Psychotria · · Score: 5, Funny

      I'd say nerds were aware of these flaws a long time ago. They chose not to make the whole world aware of this, since it helped catch criminals that continued to used these tools. this is probably only news for the criminals using the tools, which will probably mean that catching them will be more difficult in the future.

      Judging from the amount of comments thus far (about 7) I think that this "story" surely has to rate as one of the biggest in /.'s history. The lack of comments, to me, indicates that the entire population of nerds across the world are dumbfounded by the article's revelation and that they are collectively lost for words to express their dismay.

  3. There's a book which covers this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you're interested in this king of thing, Pick up "Aggressive network self-defence" It's a really interesting book full of stuff like this.