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Flight Sim Company Embeds Malware To Steal Pirates' Passwords (torrentfreak.com)
TorrentFreak: Flight sim company FlightSimLabs has found itself in trouble after installing malware onto users' machines as an anti-piracy measure. Code embedded in its A320-X module contained a mechanism for detecting 'pirate' serial numbers distributed on The Pirate Bay, which then triggered a process through which the company stole usernames and passwords from users' web browsers.
That's probably naughty, but hilarious.
Don't pirate
You pirate software and you deserve the risks.
virus
I hope they get finger-cuff banged by simultaneous lawsuits and hacking.
WTF idiot company
Ages ago, when serial port dongles were a thing, there was a vertical market package that actually required a special PCI card that, if it detected tampering or a bad serial number, would dump current from some on-board capacitors and a voltage multiplier and fry the computer.
Same thing. Problem is when the DRM measure goes off on a legitimate user. That's when the lawsuits fly, maybe even CFAA criminal cases here in the US if a DA cares enough.
You cant "EULA out of" felony crimes. This one will land when in serious criminal trouble, it will be worth watching
I want to reiterate and reaffirm that we ... would never do anything to knowingly violate the trust that you have placed in us
You mean like knowingly distributing sketchy-ass binaries completely unrelated to your game or "DRM" in any way, designed for the sole purpose of scraping sensitive information from users' computers, and only coming clean about it when you're called out on the behavior? Yeah, consider said trust officially violated. Enjoy the lawsuits.... I hope somebody gets you on a HIPAA violation or something for scraping the wrong fucking system.
Protip: talk to your fucking lawyers in the future before going all vigilante on pirates; that's what you pay them for.
Two wrongs don't make a right.
But cross me, and I'll CUT you!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
There's nothing illegal in what they have done. So far. Are they hacking? No, it was part of the software. It would be no different if they wrote the code and included it. Are they causing damage? no, afaik. Is it unethical yes. But it's not illegal. It's like that sony root kit, may be there will be a lawsuit, but I am guessing no lawyer is going to take it up because it's not worth their time.
Attempting to combat piracy with stupidity probably won't work, but ya never know so, hey! Let's try it!!
Just got to wonder how much of this is happening and has not been discovered as yet?
http://qanonposts.com/
!UW.yye1fxoQ5997a0
180445
>>180316
HK allowed his passport to clear customs WITH THE CLOWNS IN AMERICA AND DEPT OF DEFENSE PUTTING A NAT SEC HOLD WW?
How does he clear customs?
How does he end up in Russia?
Coincidence?
Who was the 1st agency he worked for?
Who taught him the game?
Who assigned him w/ foreign ops?
Why is this relevant?
Future unlocks past.
Watch the news.
Spider web.
Stop taking the sleeping pill.
Q
Feb 18 2018 20:41:03
!UW.yye1fxoQ
104
@SNOWDEN
WHERE ARE YOU?
NOT RUSSIA.
[EYES ON]
YOU ARE NOW A LIABILITY.
HELPING @JACK?
PROJECT DEEPDREAMv2[A]].
WE WILL NEVER FORGET.
ES FAILED.
WHERE IS ES?
JOHN PERRY BARLOW.
DEFINE THE END?
THE DAY OF RECKONING IS UPON US.
JOHN 3:16
Q
Q: Total take down of the deep state in progress
https://twitter.com/hashtag/qa...
13,000 sealed indictments sent in 3 months (Prior Average 1k a year) Cells for 13,000 inmates being built in Guantanamo Don't believe? check current flight records to Gitmo Contractors flying #qanon #thegreatawakening
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DW...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DW...
This is a situation where corporations are conveniently not people. So no one person will truly be held accountable.
"âoe[T]here are no tools used to reveal any sensitive information of any customer who has legitimately purchased our products."
All others gave us explicit permission to all usernames and passwords entered in the the computer. It's in our EULA your honor, we committed no crime.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
FBI/CIA job as real pilots pay for sims.
So it's some punk kid who thinks it's fun to crash planes or it's the people who don't need to learn how to land.
Let's see which distribution of the game fixes the bug (i.e. eliminates or disables the malware) the fastest: the next pirate version of the game, or the one that you buy from the lawful publishers?
I predict that pirates will perform the maintenance faster. And then the lesson being taught to this game's players will be: remember to pirate instead of buying.
But maybe my prediction is wrong. The game publisher is going to need to be amazingly fast in order to prevent sending the "you should pirate" message.
All this aside, does is strike anyone as weird that people pirate software? I'm fine with pirating media (e.g. every single movie and TV show that I watch; what's gonna happen, maybe someone will exploit a buffer overflow in a popular player?) but I would be terrified to download and execute binaries from random strangers. Yes, I did that back in the 1980s, but that's because about all I was risking was the contents of a single floppy. Once we got hard disks (and shitty OSes that don't sandbox processes very well) it seems like malware would have totally killed off software privacy. I'm amazed we're having this conversation in 2018 rather than, say, 1988.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And that's why any good pirate has, at the very least, a firewall that ask them if they want to give internet access to a software or not. Only a moron let a software/game they've pirated call home/access some web server.
Fuck with my company IP ... lower my fair profit and I fuck with yo azzwhole. Any questions byteboi ??
Just install APK's host engine with it and you'll be safe for ever because, uh, ring 0! Kernel space! No ram!
Surely he knows how to hack the hackers.
My 10 year old spent some of his money on a download of Cuphead from the Windows store a few months ago when it came out (so paid full price). After a Windows update it stopped working completely, crashing out shortly after the splash screen. After an hour or two of trying to debug this, I found the torrented repack worked just fine, and he has been using that since. Not sure what the lesson there is.
I had to crack a legitimately bought copy of GTA IV because of the steam+windows live+social club idiocy.
Upset I got the best of you again today proving botnets share C&C servers & my hosts file https://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11761710&cid=56153412/ already has data to block BOTH threats involved? Yes, obviously (lmao @U).
* ... That's vs. BOTH the botnet/malware today AND back then in the past too (double bonus, lol - for me, not you).
APK
P.S.=> If you want to keep making ME look GOOD & yourself a dumb stooge, that's FINE BY ME by all means (lol - thanks again as usual)... apk
I was about to say that it looks like you aren't even vaguely aware of what the story was about, since you said something so nonsensical. But keep reading.
If someone doesn't pirate, they still get the malware installed. It just doesn't get automatically called by the game.
So, basically, your "solution" is a total failure. OTOH, two hours after this story, the new pirate version doesn't have the malware. So your solution wasn't merely wrong: it was exactly wrong (the best solution actually being that everyone should pirate this game) and there's no way you could have done that unless you actually understood the problem perfectly, So you knew the actual solution, and simply lied to everyone about what it was. i.e. you're a merry prankster!
It's like if someone hammers their head and says "this hurts" and you provided "hit yourself harder" as the solution. Ha ha, what a comedian!
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CREIMER' SUBMISSIONS UPDATE: /. so make sure to go to:
Note also that creimer is trying to regain karma by getting his submissions published as articles on
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creimer wrote:
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Danger, Will Robinson, Danger! Creimy is posting more than 2 posts a day. Hurry! mod down otherwise /. will go to hell again!
Note: you can mod down even if already at -1 to lower karma and to prevent lost /. users to accidentally mod up.
creimer wrote:
All you need to do is find a website with a permissive TOS, say, Slashdot, create a Python script to scrape your own comments, sprinkle Amazon affiliate links in various posts, and then re-post past links whenever possible. Won't be long before you start making "coffee money" each month.
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C.D. Reimer is a renowned Slashdot collaborator, as he puts it himself; "Because of the quality of my posts and my article submissions, I'm a highly rated commentator and moderator."
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some pirates are upset that somebody tried to hack them? By their own admission, the module was only installed on every machine but only EXECUTED on systems running stolen software. Therefore, the sim company was only running the dubious code on systems run by slimes running stolen software.
Pot, meet kettle.
Do not run to the police for somebody trespassing on your lawn when you are a serial killer/robber.
There's something very twisted in the minds of psychopaths and narcissists that causes them to freely do evil to others but then become OUTRAGED when somebody does something even moderately underhanded to THEM. This is like the habitual liar, who after lying to everybody he knows for decades is shocked and outraged to discover somebody has lied to HIM.
Simple solution: STOP PIRATING OTHER PEOPLE'S STUFF. Become a civilized human being.
The only reason normal users of tech are continually facing DRM and other garbage is that people like these whining crybaby jerks are stealing stuff. If you think a piece of software is not worth the price, then do not use it. Find a free alternative, or write one. There's no excuse for spending enormous amouts of time and energy cracking software and hacking passwords and then distributing the hacks/passwords. Most of the people doing this can easily afford to buy the software they are stealing, but they just prefer to spend a thousand dollars on a new iPhone. As a rule of thumb: if you can afford a gaming rig, you can afford to buy your games.
That is a MAJOR felony under the CFAA. So, who's going to jail for 20 years?
This is a case of software "engineers" doing bad things. Real engineers would lose their license over this, at the very least.
Software "engineers" on the other hand, can hide behind their lack of licensing, credentials, professional body, professional ethics watchdog, etc.
It's just "simple programmers" trying to protect their "valuable" intellectual property.
Picture a structural engineering modifying blueprints such that anyone who copies the bridge produces a design that kills everyone as it collapses.
I'd pirate this on a secure computer and overload it with fake credentials.
These people should go to prison for criminal hacking. In many penal codes what they did is at least one order of magnitude worse than piracy.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The lesson is you and your son have been had, taken advantage of by a system intent on deceiving you.
The chief underlying problem here is proprietary (non-free, user-subjugating) software. Software you're not allowed to run, inspect, modify, or share (also known as 'software freedom'). Proprietary software is licensed and distributed to keep you from running the program despite doing normal maintenance, software meant to keep you from treating your friends as friends by sharing a copy, inspecting the program to see what it does, and distributed to prevent you from modifying your copy the program should you wish to for any reason.
I experienced something quite similar with the Commodore 64: A video game called Elite on the C-64 had an anti-copying scheme so clumsy and prone to problems it drove me to understand what was really going on. Today we'd properly call this DRM—digital restrictions management (expanded that way because I take the side of the user class, not the publisher class) which was only visited upon those who obtained their copy of the program in a way the publisher found acceptable. Typically this meant buying a copy, but I later came to understand some copies were distributed gratis. The packaged game came with media, a manual, and a flat plastic device with a see-through window. The device could be bent so it resembled a table like an inverted letter "U". On starting the game, the user was shown some blocky image that looked incomprehensible. When the plastic device was folded, placed on the monitor at the proper distance (via the "legs" of the device), and peered through one could see the blocky image turn into something readable. If I recall correctly, the readable image was a page number reference in the manual one was expected to look up and type in the proper word to get past this stage of the loading program.
After I did this a couple of times it dawned on me that those who engage in filesharing and treating friends like friends (sometimes propagandistically called "pirates") never have to put up with this. Only the people who used the publisher-distributed copy did. And most of those users had paid for this treatment.
Those who shared copies were doing us all a favor: they let us try programs before buying a copy, they let us run copies that didn't have what we now call DRM; the anti-copying code had been stripped away. They let us have copies that one could copy in an ordinary fashion, no need for special copiers (such as "nibblers", or any copier that knew how to get past the errors which were deliberately added to the disk to defeat the standard file and disk copiers). There was no need to work around the issue by using audio tapes instead of disks (since audio tapes didn't have copy-prevention added to the media). These so-called "pirates" were doing us a service, a service I might have paid for if offered the opportunity to pay a publisher for a headache-free copy of the program.
Later I obtained a memory snapshotting cartridge called "Isepic" which let me make my own copy of the RAM-resident portion of the game. Isepic produced a copy which loaded faster, never prompted me for the manual lookup, and played identically to the other copy loaded from the distributor's media (no surprise there, it was the same code being loaded into memory). I never loaded the distributor's media again. But this got me to thinking about all the other programs (not just games) that treated the users this way across all the computers I had used. And I began to realize that this was a scam perpetrated on the people who treated the publishers the best. We were literally exchanging our money for being treated badly. And this harm pushed on the users was indiscriminate, just like the flight simulator company did here.
There was one more issue to wrestle with: proprietary software. This was an issue even the filesha
Digital Citizen
spread the word bros! flightgear is free, libre and open source flight simulator.
They should be sued for damages on this one. They intentionally embedded malware into an installer and stole paying customers' data.
So in summary: 1) FlightSimLabs just destroyed their company by intentionally inserting malware into a product they were charging for. 2) FSL was asked on their forums about it when various antivirus programs identified their product as malware. They responded by saying "turn off your AV software." 3) FSL transmitted the material over an open HTTP stream. 4) The server that they have stored this stolen information on is itself secured in a very piss-poor manner. (RDP is open for God's sake.) 5) As this was intentional, and not a mere "bug," it can theoretically be prosecuted in the U.S. as a felony. (Read: Quality time in Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prtison.) 6) Even if merely incompetent, their failure to secure the data they stole is itself criminal in the EU. 7) I guarantee you that they cannot prove that at no time was any of their unencrypted HTTP steams intercepted, NOR can they prove that their obviously insecure server was not comproimised, meaning: 8) How do we know that this wasn't intentional to steal information and go sell to identity thieves? They charge $100 by identity theft. https://www.fidusinfosec.com/f... Oh, where did I get #8? That's the only logical reason they would have stolen the data in the first place. It doesn't do shit for piracy. I hope these assclowns have a good lawyer.
By naughty I did mean illegal.
Too many possible jokes.
Clearly you have never been to Europe, where the prisons are basically baby day care institutions where most residents have the latest gaming console in their rooms and get quality food three times a day.
I hope they don't have a good lawyer and are utterly destroyed.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
Break criminal law because your notcustomers are breaking civil law. GOGO
Upset I got the best of you again today proving botnets share C&C servers & my hosts file https://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11761710&cid=56153412/ already has data to block BOTH threats involved? Yes, obviously (lmao @U).
* ... That's vs. BOTH the botnet/malware today AND back then in the past too (double bonus, lol - for me, not you).
(LMAO - YOU TRIED TO "DOWNMOD HIDE" THIS when I posted it before https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11766098&cid=56154404/ (thanks for showing it "got to you" UNIDENTIFIABLE anonymous chump - you did it to yourself!)).
APK
P.S.=> If you want to keep making ME look GOOD & yourself a dumb stooge, that's FINE BY ME by all means (lol - thanks again as usual)... apk
Code embedded in its A320-X module contained a mechanism for detecting 'pirate' serial numbers distributed on The Pirate Bay, which then triggered a process through which the company stole usernames and passwords from users' web browsers.
If any individual was found to be installing this kind of malware on remote computers, they would be charged with all kinds of computer hacking crimes, just as a start.
Where's the criminal charges? This company needs to be made example of, this kind of behavior is utterly unacceptable.
You know, the AV companies should sue these idiots for responding to reports that the AV software identified their stuff as a trojan by implying that there was something wrong with the AV software.
you grab a priated key and use it...
stop right there.
This is like the guy who says "I had some money and I lost it, so I went over to the Fed and grabbed a bunch of their currency. It did not hurt them, because the Fed prints all the paper money in the first place and they'll just print replacement bills. I did not gain at all since I only replaced the bills I lost. Honestly, I had a right to those bills and I did not even take a single extra dollar"
That would not fly. The theft is still theft and still takes you to jail.
If you lose something you bought, you do not get the right to grab and use a stolen replacement; doing so makse you not only the recipient of stolen goods but in the case of you going to a pirate site to get them, you become an accessory after the fact to the computer crime. Your acyion is not the equivalent of just stumbling across something that fell off the back of a truck; you asked for the stolen goods and in doing so encouraged the thieves to continue stealing and distributing.
There's nothing more amusing than thieves complaining that somebody else done them wrong.
We don't know who struck first, us or them, but we know that it was us that scorched the sky.
>>some pirates are upset that somebody tried to hack them?
>Sounds to me like actual paying customers are upset, not Somalis trying to eke a living.
You can prove these pirates were poor Somalis? Thought not. Most are not poverty-stricken people desperate for food; they're young people with expensive computers, expensive internet connections, sufficiently educated and with comfortable enough lives that they have both the ability and the time to hack other peoples' code. Incidentally, being poor is no excuse to do illegal acts that violate the rights of others, particularly when there are so many productive things a person can do for a living.
>>only EXECUTED on systems running stolen software
>That would explain all the AV flags it caused.
So, now you think every automated DMCA notice is valid? Thought not. Antivirus flagging is not that reliable and in this case would have only seen a non executing program doing nothing wrong on a system where only legal software was in use. Again, by the thieves' own admission, the code was installed on all systems but only did its nasty work on systems running with pirated keys. I am not fond of any of this junk, but this is the most benign form of fighting back against pirates I can recall, and would not have even been though necessary by its creators were it not for the massive piracy culture.
>>Do not run to the police for somebody trespassing on your lawn when you are a serial killer/robber.
>But do run to the police if, while trespassing, you see a murder.
Not analagous. In the scenario under discussion, thieves are upset that somebody installed a tawdry bit of code to catch them. The persons doing the worst bit were the thieves and not the people trying to stop the thieves.
>>STOP PIRATING OTHER PEOPLE'S STUFF. Become a civilized human being.
>These are not connected.
They are absolutely connected. A society where people feel free to steal anything they want (and in this case something as un-critical as a GAME), simply because they want it and do not want to pay for it (not because they are in extreme poverty and need it to live, like food water or medicine) and who then help an unlimited number of others to the ill-gotten goods is a society that is in danger of crumbling. Civilization requires that most people play by a set of rules for commerce, and if some will flout those rules and get away with it long enough that the masses start to see no reason why they too should not steal everything they want, civilization is put at hazard.
>>The only reason normal users of tech are continually facing DRM and other garbage is that people like these whining crybaby jerks are stealing stuff.
>That's not the case. If nothing else, normal users of tech historically paid a certain amount for software and used a certain amount of software and those amounts were never the same.
>But apart from that, software copyright infringement does not justify rootkits, system damaging DRM or indeed, hacking peoples passwords.
Your answer is meaningless. There was a time in the computing world where people were not passing out tens of thousands of stolen copies of a program. The floppy disk era made it easier to pass hacked programs around, and software vendors started to realize how much money they were losing to "sneaker net" piracy, so they added in various disk-based protections. Fast forward to the internet era and we see all sorts of schemes to protect revenues from piracy, each adding another annoyance to legitimate honest users. If a piece of code is not worth buying then do not prove it has value to you by going to the effort to steal it. You don't get to have it both ways - either it's not valuable it or it is. You do not get to go to Elon Musk and say "golly, I love that Tesla, but it's only worth $5 so stand back and let me steal it" (oh, and then fail to even pay the lower price you claimed it might be worth).
I hate DRM and rootkits, but in a world full of amoral j
No sympathy here. Some of these flightsim developers have some of the most absurd anti-piracy practices and forum rule requirements which would make privacy advocates head spin *cough* PMDG *cough*. Complain and they ban you. It's almost as bad as some of these HAM software tool developers who ban you from ever using their software again for saying anything bad about them.
Shave your neck. And lose some weight.
I'm not sure about your baby day care institutions. Even if these institutions accomplish lower recidivism levels in former inmates that yours do, they're still prisons. And Greece is the Florida of Europe anyway. They won't be as progressive as you might think. They were running notorious prison islands as late as in the 1970s.
Ezekiel 23:20
specifically harvest bank info and use it to transfer funds equal to the purchase price to my company. Plus any applicable taxes. Then I'd send them an email telling them not to worry, we corrected the accounting oversight that resulted in them ending up with a bad serial number. Oh, and that as a courtesy we waived the service fee. What service fee you ask? It doesn't matter, we waived it. Stop worrying so much.
If you have the ability to determine that a copy of your software is running under a false key, why not just render that copy of the software inoperable?
Oh, that's right. The company is run by a bunch of really smart, young, disruptive brogrammers who just had to prove that they swing the bigger dick.
This little bit of ego trip is going to cost them a lot, possibly even jail time for someone. Was it worth it? What did they achieve?
This is one reason why tech companies might want to rethink their hire-only-the-young mantras. Sometimes it's good to have mature adults around.
Note to FlightSimLabs management: Just because you broke the law does not make it legal for your prison cellmate to assrape you.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
One thing is certain, getting raped in the asshole by other men in prison is an American thing, and it just doesn't happen in Europe.
There's something about the US prison industrial complex that turns men into flaming homosexuals who can't stop trying to ejaculate inside other men's assholes. There's also some dudes who actively seek it out and let everyone know their asshole is available, which is where "sagging" originated.