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Botnet Mafia in Online Turf War
Posted by
samzenpus
on Mon May 14, 2007 07:07 AM
from the make-them-an-offer-they-can't-refuse dept.
from the make-them-an-offer-they-can't-refuse dept.
An anonymous reader writes " The kind of turf war seen in the real world by drug gangs is being replicated by the criminal gangs behind spamming botnets, and things are turning nasty."
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Trying to care (Score:3, Interesting)
As someone who doesn't have an email address anymore, I really don't care about spam in the slightest, or the battle they go over to spam people. Most of my spam, that actually made it to my inbox when I had a gmail account was in Portuguese or some random asian looking language. To me it was all gibberish [more than usual] and fleeting. But the ever presence of it [on average I would receive anywhere between 100 and 500 spams a day, with about 5-10 in my inbox] just gnaws at you. Day after day people keep assaulting your inbox, trying to take away the service from you.
And even though gmail is free, it was still MY inbox, if you know what I mean. And having these low lifes just clutter it up every day with the same foreign language bullshit nonsense was annoying.
Eventually I just deleted my account. I have a cell phone if people want to contact me. And for work I have a private email addy that my co-workers can use. Personal email is just a waste.
Tom
Re:Trying to care (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Trying to care (Score:4, Insightful)
My work email has yet to receive a single spam. Oh, that's because I don't use it for anything but work and it's not on any webpage.
Tom
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I was spam free for quite a while, but in the last few years, the enterprise wide
address book has clearly been harvested (some 10000+ addresses)
by a bad apple somewhere. I imagine someone installed a "free screensaver"
or something else with a backdoor, or took a company laptop to a unprotected network
and gotten scanned and rooted, etc etc....
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Part of the problem, I feel, are legitimate organizations who sell their client lists to spammers. My work address never got spam until I got published in a professional journal. That journal sold its contributors' email addresses to someone, and I started receiving spam. I have no good solution here -- I'm a scientist, and have to publish or peri
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Hmm, this is fun. It's like AOLspeak for techs! And it makes a little more sense.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Medraut
aren't you special? (Score:4, Insightful)
P.S. Some of us need personal email and have relied on it heavily for 15 years.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
We shouldn't get too worked up over botnets fighting.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I assume you mean "we" as in the "my family and I" sense; because you certainly don't speak for the rest of us. 27 years ago an emailed message led to me meeting my wife, an event that I personally consider very important.
Just because you don't find email useful doesn't make it useless to the rest of us.
Apart from the spam aspect, botnets are also used to stage attacks on all manner of ta
Re:Trying to care (Score:5, Insightful)
You do realize that the costs of spam mitigation are all passed on to you, in the form of higher prices for gadgets, for professional and financial services, and eventually for everything else? Or do you not care about that either?
By the way, now that we are out of the Grunge era, it is no longer automatically cool to not care about such things.
Parent
Re:Trying to care (Score:4, Funny)
So, do you still have a TV? [theonion.com]
Parent
Careful.. (Score:4, Funny)
ISPs have to be the solution (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Send an email to all customers saying that the ISP will begin choosing a random day (say every 3 months or so) to scan for infected computers churning out email.
2) On that random day (random so the spam bots won't be programmed to be silent on that day) the ISP shuts down outgoing mail for all infected computers on their network.
3) Customer who can't send mail is irate and calls ISP tech support hotline.
4) Tech support says: we warned you... please follow these virus removal instructions and install/update your anti virus software.
Bam problem solved. People who keep getting blocked every 3 months will quickly learn to take better care of their computers. Along with the customer's invoice the ISP could send an information sheet with prevention and removal instructions.
Maybe governments can give ISPs a little financial help for doing this?
Unfortunately I don't see any other solution other than tough-love.
Re:ISPs have to be the solution (Score:5, Funny)
I think this is a problem only MSFT can solve.
Tom
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Although I suppose he should get -1 for not using a
-1's all around! Whee!
Re:ISPs have to be the solution (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know about the rest of the world, but in the UK ISPs routinely cut off people if their machines are spewing spam (or other malware). The first thing most users know is when any web page they try and visit takes them to an ISP page telling them to run some malware scanning software.
Rich.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Even if they have been charged multiple times with drunk driving, they are able to get their license back, because it's something they "need". In some situations a car is needed, but if you continually show that you aren't going to be responsible, then you really think you have the need for a car.
I'm not sure I'd compare this to drunk driving. If you drive drunk then you had a choice, and clear responsibility not to do that. On the other hand grandmothers buy Windoze computers to type out emails to t
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:ISPs have to be the solution (Score:4, Insightful)
People who keep getting blocked every 3 months will quickly learn to take better care of their computers.
It's a great theory, but in practice, I'm afraid that your average lazy consumer will simply switch to another (non-blocking) ISP who will happily take their money. 99% of the computer users out there don't even know what a spam bot is (unless they can regurgitate some buzzword from a commercial they saw), let alone how to fix a crippled PC. Your strategy only works if all the ISPs agree to it, and that ain't gonna happen.
Let's face it -- it's time for a new and improved mail protocol.
Parent
Re:ISPs have to be the solution (Score:5, Informative)
And I still haven't seen any mail protocol proposals that would both cut down on spam in an effective fashion as well as not interfere with legitimate mail and not violating non-technical requirements like privacy etc.
Seriously, spam is a semantic problem, in a way; something that is spam for one person or in one situation need not be spam for someone else or in another situation. I'm signed up for a handful of company newsletters informing me about special offers etc., for example, and those aren't spam (since I signed up for them), but if I received them without having signed up, I'd definitely consider them spam. How is a mail delivery protocol supposed to be able to distinguish between these situations?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Five years ago, I would have agreed with you. The problem is, (some) of those same kids who were fixing computers a few years ago have graduated to writing the malware they used to remove. I am gainfully e
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Then make it a legal requirement
Yeah, that's what we need -- more laws regulating the Internet. You know, 'cuz the ones we have already work so well.
Re:ISPs have to be the solution (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:ISPs have to be the solution (Score:5, Informative)
I know the good intentions and all that, but seriously, I'm already pissed enough at my ISP (Tiscali.it) that doesn't allow me to send more than 3 consecutive emails.
So either implement this kind of stuff with a proper way to tell spam sending from acceptable mass mailing, or be ready to handle hordes of very angry customers.
Parent
Re:ISPs have to be the solution (Score:5, Funny)
Of course, when I answer: "Er... I have a Mac" the answer is "Uh... I don't know... did you try restarting?"
Parent
oblig checklist (Score:3, Informative)
(X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (X) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the mone
Botnet Mafia warnings (Score:4, Funny)
Let's have ... (Score:5, Funny)
"Watch out! They just spawned a thread that has access to your virtual address space! Protect your data registers!"
Where will there HQs be? (Score:4, Funny)
Cash Rules Everything Around Me (Score:3, Interesting)
We're doomed (Score:5, Funny)
Final solution (Score:4, Funny)
Botnets blowing each other up? (Score:3, Funny)
Oh wait, that also means the tubes get clogged. Dang it.
PGP is your friend (Score:5, Insightful)
It's amazing how hard it is to get a company to send you a signed email to prove who they are and even harder to send an encrypted email containing personal information to them even though everyone knows how insecure email it.
Lazy Government,
Lazy Companies,
Lazy Consumers.
The tools are there for free and have been for years.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
We need to have it integraded into our clients in such a way that everyone would start using it. However, it'd be a lot easier to do that with IM than email as of now. You can have the client add the contact's key when the contact is added, and you can store it on a server side list so that
End the War On Botnets (Score:3, Funny)
This will eventually be solved on its own (Score:3, Interesting)
And ISPs who act against it will finally gain a reputation for providing being spam-free services. Just regularly call your ISP and complain about that they don't filter the spam.
For me having about 20-30 junk mails in my inbox per day isn't really much trouble. T'Bird does a fairly good job detecting them. And if it really starts to bug me I will install something like spamassassin on my server. So, who cares.
Don't get me wrong: I just hate this stuff like everyone else. But even wasting thoughts on it is useless.
Yt,
Gunnar
No, not really (Score:5, Funny)
Until I actually RTFA, I thought they meant that botnet gangs were finding the people running opposing botnets and killing them.
Or maybe I was just secretly hoping.
And this will only get worse (Score:4, Interesting)
Botnets rely on people being negligent, clueless and generally careless. There is no such thing as an unavoidable infection. Over 99% of all infections rely on user interaction (and yes, while over 98% of percentages used in biased reports are fake, this one I can actually vouch for), with remote exploits only constituting for a very, very small of infections, most of which also relying on your use of an insecure machine directly connected to the net.
If people acted on the road like the act in the net, a mass accident with 100s of cars involved would not be a newsworthy item. It would be the rule in rush hour traffic! And as much as I hate car analogies, this one is sadly true.
People switch their common sense off when they access the internet. I have no other explanation for this phenomenon. You can get most people to double click your attachment with the most hare brained excuse, "important news from your lawyer" is often enough.
Even if they have none!
With the "from" line reading "lawyer"!!!
The main problem isn't spam. The core problem is that those botnets are then used to spread even more and even more dangerous malware around. Bankfraud being one of the more "harmless" things in their arsenal.
People have to be held responsible for what their machines do, and what cause they harm to the rest of the net population. I'm not talking jail time, it needn't be capital punishment. The people we're talking about are not your "usual criminals". They already wet their pants if there's a chance that they could have to show up as defendent in court, as those "you went to our page so you owe us 500 bucks or we drag you to court" scams prove. Some kind of nominal fine would already be plenty.
Don't get me wrong. I don't want to keep anyone from using the net. But as with everything that can be harmful to other people using the same tools you do, you have to act responsibly. This applies to cars, this applies to guns, and it also applies to machines with internet connection.
Re:And this will only get worse (Score:4, Insightful)
So why shouldn't people doubleclick their attachments? I mean, to read the attachment, you have to doubleclick it, right? So why are you suggesting that they shouldn't?
This is completely counterintuitive. The people who need to be held responsible are the idiot programmers who allow arbitrary code to be executed by clicking on attachments in a program deliberately designed for end-users. Such a feature in an email-program sounds like it might be more useful to movable-computation researchers working on lab-machines in a closed network.
And by clicking on attachments, you are harming someone? By simply leaving your computer connected to the Internet, you are harming someone?
This is completely counterintuitive. It would be like prosecuting car-owners for having their cars parked in the garage instead of constantly driving it to and from the factory for "updates". Or prosecuting gun-owners because the manufacturer of the gun decided that whenever you put the safety on, the gun would fire a shot, if someone sent a certain radio-signal.
Nonsense! Technical problems deserve a technical solution!
Parent
How to avoid spam (slightly OT) (Score:3, Funny)
Do not open porn sites (Yes, he said 'open')
Do not watch online movies
Keep an updated anti virus
Do not use web based e-mail
When not using your computer turn it off. Laptop users should close the lid.(I love this one!)
The most peculiar though was that not once did he warn about giving out your e-mail address. Thank god we have experts like that to help us protect our self...
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Somehow... (Score:4, Funny)
Might as well spoof Takedown as well, where a fugitive hacker leads his asian arch nemesis on a cross-country chase through every brothel in the USA, all over a dick-length argument. They finally settle their feud in a stomach-churning scene where they both anally violate a journalist named John Warkoff.
Oh come on! When have you ever seen pr0n with a good story ?
Parent
Re:Somehow... (Score:5, Funny)
Botnets... come out to play-ayyyyy!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I'm actually *related* to italian mafioso (though not involved), and I don't give a half-shit about this. Mafia implies italians about as much as Nazi implies germans. It's a specific group of Not-Very-Nice people, and these days, they're of any race creed or color. Use it in that fashion and the implication fades.
No, seriously. If your offended, your oversensitive. Shut up and deal with it.
Re:Somehow... (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, Sir.
Parent
Re:fix the cause not the symptom (Score:4, Insightful)
A "war on spam" might actually work better than "war on drugs" simply because there are liklely to be far fewer people who wants spam than want various drugs.
the whole enviroment that these people thrive in is made possible by MS Windows and its' horrible security. why don't we start screaming about fixing the root cause of the problem ?
Thing is that there are plenty of people who appear to think that Microsoft's bluring the line between user & administrator or having a "monoculture" environment is a good thing.
Parent