Let's not forget the evil that is LOP.com... this crap gets installed on peoples system when they are searching the internet for mp3 songs.
You will come across a site called mp3search.com or something to that effect that installed lop. The last time my wife got infected with it, adaware and spybot could not get rid of it...
Ever have one of those weeks? This has just not been the best couple of days for me or for Valve.
Yes, the source code that has been posted is the HL-2 source code.
Here is what we know:
1) Starting around 9/11 of this year, someone other than me was accessing my email account. This has been determined by looking at traffic on our email server versus my travel schedule.
2) Shortly afterwards my machine started acting weird (right-clicking on executables would crash explorer). I was unable to find a virus or trojan on my machine, I reformatted my hard drive, and reinstalled.
3) For the next week, there appears to have been suspicious activity on my webmail account.
4) Around 9/19 someone made a copy of the HL-2 source tree.
5) At some point, keystroke recorders got installed on several machines at Valve. Our speculation is that these were done via a buffer overflow in Outlook's preview pane. This recorder is apparently a customized version of RemoteAnywhere created to infect Valve (at least it hasn't been seen anywhere else, and isn't detected by normal virus scanning tools).
6) Periodically for the last year we've been the subject of a variety of denial of service attacks targetted at our webservers and at Steam. We don't know if these are related or independent.
Well, this sucks.
What I'd appreciate is the assistance of the community in tracking this down. I have a special email address for people to send information to, helpvalve@valvesoftware.com. If you have information about the denial of service attacks or the infiltration of our network, please send the details. There are some pretty obvious places to start with the posts and records in IRC, so if you can point us in the right direction, that would be great.
We at Valve have always thought of ourselves as being part of a community, and I can't imagine a better group of people to help us take care of these problems than this community.
I told dad he better give me the $20 to buy the new Eminem CD! I know I only like one song off it but I really wanted it and he wouldn't give me the money!
I started playing SWG a few days after it came out. I am new to MMORPGs and after the initial shock of the gameplay learning curve I am having quite a bit of fun.
I have noticed reciently that a vast majority of old school MMORPGers get there thrills from bitching and complaining about EVERYTHING. I have all but stopped reading the general message boards at the SOE site as its all ranting on various stupid crap.
I can honestly say that in the last two weeks of game play, I have not been effected by people selling credits on eBay. Or creature handlers gaining massive amounts if XP. Or any of the other crap people are whining about.
Ok, I have never played a MMORPG. I have no idea what the game play entails or even how these games work. But I have a few friends at work who do and I enjoy the Star Wars Mythos, so I thought I would take a chance and pick this one up.
Now unlike others, I got the game the day AFTER it hit the shelves, so I had no problems logging in and creating an account. I was able to quickly create a human scout character, name him Knynetic Flyingsky (or some thing like that) and get in the game. Oh yeah, I was able to do this after about a 20 minute wait downloading patches.
Once in the game, I opted to do the training mission. The mission laid out the basics of the game fairly easily and understandably and soon I was on the face of a planet in some city. I was then introduced to the "Lost Connection with Star Wars Galaxies" message. Now this message and I have become good friends over the last week or so. You see the fun thing about the LCSWG message is that there is no obvious way to reconnect other than quitting out of the game and relaunching. If someone is aware of a command such as/reconnect for Quake, please let me know.
Hooking Up:
After logging in, the first thing I did was bring up the email system and message a friend from work telling him to come get me. I then moved around the starting city looking at various things until he got there. Once he arrived, he gave me $1000 credits and a carbine rifle. And then LCSWG showed up to make the game more difficult.
After logging in again, my friend and I went back to the city he was in originally and we hooked up with a couple other guys and LCSWG.
After logging in again, we went hunting for moths and butterflies as anything larger quickly smacked all 4 of us down. At this point I discovered that I could harvest resources from the fallen bugs and create traps that seem to do nothing at this point. So, I began trap making and bug killing with my friends. Until LCSWG.
That was enough for that night. I walked away and finished up reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I must admit that Harry never once LCSWG'd me.
So a few days later I though I would give it a shot again and I logged in to my account. After downloading more patches, I was in. Now this time my friends were not online, although LCSWG seems to never leave really. I decided to do some exploring as the prospect of killing moths and butterflies sounded just boring as hell.
During my exploration, I ran across a NPC who needed a task completed and was offering a handsome reward, so I accepted. The mission seemed simple enough. Go find this person and escort them back to me. No problem. I loaded up the way point and headed out. I walked and walked and walked and walked and walked. The creatures around me grew and grew and grew and became ever more aggressive. Once I was a great distance into the wilderness LCSWG showed up and said hi.
After I logged back in, I walked some more and had 6-7 very aggressive hedge hogs attack me out of the blue and quickly incapacitate my character. So I'm sitting there waiting to regain my footing, when, you guessed it, LCSWG. So, I walked away from the PC.
Mission 1:
After a few days I decided to give it a shot again. After downloading more patches, I was logged back in and standing out in the middle of no where. I brought up the world map to get my bearings and noticed that my mission objective was actually in another city. What a dumb ass I am! I didn't have to walk there, I could take a shuttle. So I turned around and began walking back to the city I had come from. LCSWG'd.
Logged back in and trekked all the way back to the city. Quickly bought a ticket to the other city at a shuttle port and waited the 6 minutes for a shuttle to show up. Once I arrived in the new city I quickly made my way to the giant beam of light god had decided to shine on my objective, and began a conversation with the NPC I was supposed to escort.
I live in an apartment so running wire through the walls is not an option at this time, so I have went completely wireless.
Running through my Linksys 802.11b router I have 2 PCs hardwired, 2 laptops connected wirelessly, 2 TiVos connected wirelessly and one slightly modded XBox connected wirelessly.
The TiVos have the version 4 sofware isntalled and are able to share content between each other as well as pull MP3s & photos from any share on my netwrork. The Xbox is able to stream audio and play DivX and VCD formats locally.
Now that I am done bragging, I'll tell you how it performs. For audio and images, this set up rocks wirelessly! My wife has set up several photo albums on her PC and we can check them out any time we want. The MP3 share on my machine also works flawlessly. But it is the transfer of video that show the weakness in the system. When transfering say the last Buffy from the living room TiVo to the Bedroom TiVo it is painfully slow! And while you can watch the show as it transfers, there is really no point as the connection is not fast enough to trasfer enough video to watch, so you get very long pauses. My house hold has taken to having both TiVos record some of the same shows! (so i can get my Daily Show fix anywhere I want 8p)
As for the Xbox, forget about it! FTPing into it via wireless methods is only good for clean up. If you seriously want to trasfer that X2 rip you got from usenet, it has to be hardwired to the router. The wireless connection just cant handle it in any reasonable time frame.
While I enjoy my set up quite a bit, when I finally do move into a house, we will be running Cat-5 to every room. The 802.11b router will still be there as it is a god send for laptops but it is no where near what is needed for home entertainment. I am sure other standards would work better or a better geek could work magic, but I am me and this system has been built slowly over the last year and a half...
I think that argument is coming to an end soon. Claiming international entity to cover for the fact you are processing illegal transactions is BS legal double speak. The fact still remains this company is based out of CA and will be procecuted as such.
As for the US Mint Post, that is not the same thing. The US Mint does not have direct knowledge of any transactions and they dont skim a percentage off the top.
PayPal has been used for quite a while in the grey market... DSS hacking hardware, Drugs by mail, Betting... It was only a matter of time they got busted for it. They are profiting on illegal activities.
hrm.. I got modded as redundant.. I have yet to see another link to that site../me shruggs...
You are right there are several ideas on that site that are very interesting. The drive to create comercials a few months ago was pretty amazing. I stayed up one night to catch the one broadcast in Seattle.
Iraqis where stunned today by the calculated release of Duke Nukem Forever. Saddam was quoted as saying, "We were expecting the unexpected! But this.. this is beyond comprehension."
After over 4 years in development, it had been assumed that DNF was vaporware. It placed in the Wired Vaporware list for 3 years running.
Word from the White House calls the attack a decapitating blow. President Bush stated, "I think the release of DNF was the most significant tactical move ever made in the history of warfare."
When asked about these developments, Duke claimed, "It's time to kick ass and chew bubble gum. And, I'm all out of gum."
If you steal a jet, you deprive the owner of the jet. If you do not live in an area DirecTV will service (such as the entire country of Canada) and you intercept their signal, you do not deprive them of anything.
I can't help but wonder if Farscape's budget went to fund this. If it is anything like Taken, they made the wrong choice. Be prepared to see this on SFC at least 4 times a month for the next 3 years if not longer.
A couple months ago, I noted that my homepage had been hi-jacked and other odd things were happening to me in IE. I searched around and found Xupiter on my system. I nuked it and forgot about it.
Two weeks later I get the same thing... I got slightly pissed and downloaded a copy of Mozilla. I deleted the IE icon from my desktop and my quicklaunch. After the initial shock of doing things the Mozilla way, I fell in love and now use Phoenix as my primary browser.
Thanks Xupiter! With out you, I prolly would have never abandoned IE.
I just finished reading the [H] review.. and all I can say is ouch! I have been looking forward to this card... For weeks I have been saying it would be my next video card just in time for DOOM III. It will replace my aging Geforce 3 Ti500.
Now I am pausing. I will read more and wait for official benchmarks for released cards and make a informed decision... good lord Im losing my fanboy'ism for Nvidia..
And I can tell you why. I have spent $300+ on my last 3 video cards over the last 4 years. I am sick of it... These fuckers are going to give me something in exchange for that money that is a huge improvement or they can go piss up a rope!
Slashdot Mirror
I am stupified... someone has finally found the ????? in the buisness plan. Amazing...
1. Buy computers
2. Blackmail companies for $40k or DDoS them
3. Profit!
Let's not forget the evil that is LOP.com... this crap gets installed on peoples system when they are searching the internet for mp3 songs.
You will come across a site called mp3search.com or something to that effect that installed lop. The last time my wife got infected with it, adaware and spybot could not get rid of it...
Nasty bit of malware.
Ever have one of those weeks? This has just not been the best couple of days for me or for Valve.
s =& threadid=10692
Yes, the source code that has been posted is the HL-2 source code.
Here is what we know:
1) Starting around 9/11 of this year, someone other than me was accessing my email account. This has been determined by looking at traffic on our email server versus my travel schedule.
2) Shortly afterwards my machine started acting weird (right-clicking on executables would crash explorer). I was unable to find a virus or trojan on my machine, I reformatted my hard drive, and reinstalled.
3) For the next week, there appears to have been suspicious activity on my webmail account.
4) Around 9/19 someone made a copy of the HL-2 source tree.
5) At some point, keystroke recorders got installed on several machines at Valve. Our speculation is that these were done via a buffer overflow in Outlook's preview pane. This recorder is apparently a customized version of RemoteAnywhere created to infect Valve (at least it hasn't been seen anywhere else, and isn't detected by normal virus scanning tools).
6) Periodically for the last year we've been the subject of a variety of denial of service attacks targetted at our webservers and at Steam. We don't know if these are related or independent.
Well, this sucks.
What I'd appreciate is the assistance of the community in tracking this down. I have a special email address for people to send information to, helpvalve@valvesoftware.com. If you have information about the denial of service attacks or the infiltration of our network, please send the details. There are some pretty obvious places to start with the posts and records in IRC, so if you can point us in the right direction, that would be great.
We at Valve have always thought of ourselves as being part of a community, and I can't imagine a better group of people to help us take care of these problems than this community.
Gabe
http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread.php?
Anyone thought that the voice over sounds alot like the Oricle. I wonder what the possibility the little speach she is giving is to Agent Smith.
I told dad he better give me the $20 to buy the new Eminem CD! I know I only like one song off it but I really wanted it and he wouldn't give me the money!
It's all Dad's fault!
The first step to the FCC stepping in and regulating Wi-Fi has just been taken. Coperate Amerika must ensure it controls the comunication networks.
I would be interested in a recording of that conversation... or at least a log of it.
I was totally inspired by this post.
http://www.str8dog.com/matrixkb/
I started playing SWG a few days after it came out. I am new to MMORPGs and after the initial shock of the gameplay learning curve I am having quite a bit of fun.
I have noticed reciently that a vast majority of old school MMORPGers get there thrills from bitching and complaining about EVERYTHING. I have all but stopped reading the general message boards at the SOE site as its all ranting on various stupid crap.
I can honestly say that in the last two weeks of game play, I have not been effected by people selling credits on eBay. Or creature handlers gaining massive amounts if XP. Or any of the other crap people are whining about.
Intro:
/reconnect for Quake, please let me know.
Ok, I have never played a MMORPG. I have no idea what the game play entails or even how these games work. But I have a few friends at work who do and I enjoy the Star Wars Mythos, so I thought I would take a chance and pick this one up.
Now unlike others, I got the game the day AFTER it hit the shelves, so I had no problems logging in and creating an account. I was able to quickly create a human scout character, name him Knynetic Flyingsky (or some thing like that) and get in the game. Oh yeah, I was able to do this after about a 20 minute wait downloading patches.
Once in the game, I opted to do the training mission. The mission laid out the basics of the game fairly easily and understandably and soon I was on the face of a planet in some city. I was then introduced to the "Lost Connection with Star Wars Galaxies" message. Now this message and I have become good friends over the last week or so. You see the fun thing about the LCSWG message is that there is no obvious way to reconnect other than quitting out of the game and relaunching. If someone is aware of a command such as
Hooking Up:
After logging in, the first thing I did was bring up the email system and message a friend from work telling him to come get me. I then moved around the starting city looking at various things until he got there. Once he arrived, he gave me $1000 credits and a carbine rifle. And then LCSWG showed up to make the game more difficult.
After logging in again, my friend and I went back to the city he was in originally and we hooked up with a couple other guys and LCSWG.
After logging in again, we went hunting for moths and butterflies as anything larger quickly smacked all 4 of us down. At this point I discovered that I could harvest resources from the fallen bugs and create traps that seem to do nothing at this point. So, I began trap making and bug killing with my friends. Until LCSWG.
That was enough for that night. I walked away and finished up reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I must admit that Harry never once LCSWG'd me.
So a few days later I though I would give it a shot again and I logged in to my account. After downloading more patches, I was in. Now this time my friends were not online, although LCSWG seems to never leave really. I decided to do some exploring as the prospect of killing moths and butterflies sounded just boring as hell.
During my exploration, I ran across a NPC who needed a task completed and was offering a handsome reward, so I accepted. The mission seemed simple enough. Go find this person and escort them back to me. No problem. I loaded up the way point and headed out. I walked and walked and walked and walked and walked. The creatures around me grew and grew and grew and became ever more aggressive. Once I was a great distance into the wilderness LCSWG showed up and said hi.
After I logged back in, I walked some more and had 6-7 very aggressive hedge hogs attack me out of the blue and quickly incapacitate my character. So I'm sitting there waiting to regain my footing, when, you guessed it, LCSWG. So, I walked away from the PC.
Mission 1:
After a few days I decided to give it a shot again. After downloading more patches, I was logged back in and standing out in the middle of no where. I brought up the world map to get my bearings and noticed that my mission objective was actually in another city. What a dumb ass I am! I didn't have to walk there, I could take a shuttle. So I turned around and began walking back to the city I had come from. LCSWG'd.
Logged back in and trekked all the way back to the city. Quickly bought a ticket to the other city at a shuttle port and waited the 6 minutes for a shuttle to show up. Once I arrived in the new city I quickly made my way to the giant beam of light god had decided to shine on my objective, and began a conversation with the NPC I was supposed to escort.
The NPC inf
Would be easy to send out 5 million letters demanding $3500 & all your hardware or they will sue you for copyright violation.
It's working wonders for DirecTV.
damn I found that so funny I registered the .com domian... Mind if I use your line?
I threw up a forum for people who would like to list their public nodes here
but i can't leave with out my buddy, SUPERFLY!
I am so bad...
I live in an apartment so running wire through the walls is not an option at this time, so I have went completely wireless.
Running through my Linksys 802.11b router I have 2 PCs hardwired, 2 laptops connected wirelessly, 2 TiVos connected wirelessly and one slightly modded XBox connected wirelessly.
The TiVos have the version 4 sofware isntalled and are able to share content between each other as well as pull MP3s & photos from any share on my netwrork. The Xbox is able to stream audio and play DivX and VCD formats locally.
Now that I am done bragging, I'll tell you how it performs. For audio and images, this set up rocks wirelessly! My wife has set up several photo albums on her PC and we can check them out any time we want. The MP3 share on my machine also works flawlessly. But it is the transfer of video that show the weakness in the system. When transfering say the last Buffy from the living room TiVo to the Bedroom TiVo it is painfully slow! And while you can watch the show as it transfers, there is really no point as the connection is not fast enough to trasfer enough video to watch, so you get very long pauses. My house hold has taken to having both TiVos record some of the same shows! (so i can get my Daily Show fix anywhere I want 8p)
As for the Xbox, forget about it! FTPing into it via wireless methods is only good for clean up. If you seriously want to trasfer that X2 rip you got from usenet, it has to be hardwired to the router. The wireless connection just cant handle it in any reasonable time frame.
While I enjoy my set up quite a bit, when I finally do move into a house, we will be running Cat-5 to every room. The 802.11b router will still be there as it is a god send for laptops but it is no where near what is needed for home entertainment. I am sure other standards would work better or a better geek could work magic, but I am me and this system has been built slowly over the last year and a half...
You missed the point entirely. PayPal is based in California. Therefore they must conform to the laws of said state and country.
I think that argument is coming to an end soon. Claiming international entity to cover for the fact you are processing illegal transactions is BS legal double speak. The fact still remains this company is based out of CA and will be procecuted as such.
As for the US Mint Post, that is not the same thing. The US Mint does not have direct knowledge of any transactions and they dont skim a percentage off the top.
PayPal has been used for quite a while in the grey market... DSS hacking hardware, Drugs by mail, Betting... It was only a matter of time they got busted for it. They are profiting on illegal activities.
hrm.. I got modded as redundant.. I have yet to see another link to that site.. /me shruggs...
You are right there are several ideas on that site that are very interesting. The drive to create comercials a few months ago was pretty amazing. I stayed up one night to catch the one broadcast in Seattle.
FarScape has been a great show and has a very dedicated fan base. You can find out more about the efforts to save it at www.savefarscape.com.
Very nicely put together site with tons of info.
Iraqis where stunned today by the calculated release of Duke Nukem Forever. Saddam was quoted as saying, "We were expecting the unexpected! But this.. this is beyond comprehension."
After over 4 years in development, it had been assumed that DNF was vaporware. It placed in the Wired Vaporware list for 3 years running.
Word from the White House calls the attack a decapitating blow. President Bush stated, "I think the release of DNF was the most significant tactical move ever made in the history of warfare."
When asked about these developments, Duke claimed, "It's time to kick ass and chew bubble gum. And, I'm all out of gum."
More at 11:00
If you steal a jet, you deprive the owner of the jet. If you do not live in an area DirecTV will service (such as the entire country of Canada) and you intercept their signal, you do not deprive them of anything.
I can't help but wonder if Farscape's budget went to fund this. If it is anything like Taken, they made the wrong choice. Be prepared to see this on SFC at least 4 times a month for the next 3 years if not longer.
A couple months ago, I noted that my homepage had been hi-jacked and other odd things were happening to me in IE. I searched around and found Xupiter on my system. I nuked it and forgot about it.
Two weeks later I get the same thing... I got slightly pissed and downloaded a copy of Mozilla. I deleted the IE icon from my desktop and my quicklaunch. After the initial shock of doing things the Mozilla way, I fell in love and now use Phoenix as my primary browser.
Thanks Xupiter! With out you, I prolly would have never abandoned IE.
I just finished reading the [H] review.. and all I can say is ouch! I have been looking forward to this card... For weeks I have been saying it would be my next video card just in time for DOOM III. It will replace my aging Geforce 3 Ti500.
Now I am pausing. I will read more and wait for official benchmarks for released cards and make a informed decision... good lord Im losing my fanboy'ism for Nvidia..
And I can tell you why. I have spent $300+ on my last 3 video cards over the last 4 years. I am sick of it... These fuckers are going to give me something in exchange for that money that is a huge improvement or they can go piss up a rope!