Botnet Mafia in Online Turf War

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."

Re:ISPs have to be the solution

[PeeAitchPee]

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.

Re:Trying to care

[tomstdenis]

I posted in usenet for several years, wrote OSS software, have my email addy on my websites, etc.

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

aren't you special?

[ClioCJS]

You come off as an asshole. Just letting you know.

P.S. Some of us need personal email and have relied on it heavily for 15 years.

Re:Somehow...

[s_p_oneil]

Well, I could be wrong. Sneakers wasn't bad, and it managed to include hackers and the mafia. ;-)

Re:ISPs have to be the solution

[Richard W.M. Jones]

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 their dear beloved grandchildren. It's hardly the grandmother's fault that the computers are built so badly that they easily get infected through ordinary daily use. The responsibility and liability should be with the manufacturers of the software who ignore (what should be) standard practice.

Rich.

PGP is your friend

[oliverthered]

If people actually started using the tools that have been available for years and signed their emails it would be a lot easier to spot the ones sent out by spam bots.

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:ISPs have to be the solution

[CastrTroy]

But MS gets very little grief to fix it, because the users don't experience any direct problems. Those who know what they're doing, including Computer savvy people and network admins for large companies will put the proper measures in place to protect against potential problems, just as their would with any OS. But as long as grandma is still able to send email, then she is happy. It might be a little show if her computer is part of a botnet, but she's still able to do her work. If the ISPs start to cut enough people off, and telling them why, then maybe MS will start to have to make home machines without any ports open by default.

Re:ISPs have to be the solution

[@madeus]

I agree that software companies should be more responsible than they presently are (and that software doesn't do what it could to keep users safe), but it's ultimately a toss up between an OS thats horrible and frustrating to use (e.g. Vista style constant nagging whenever you try to do anything) and just relying on users common sense. When you do get to the stage of having constant blocking and / or popups during normal use, those messages lose their effectiveness, because users click right through them (power users and novice users alike).

When users get infected with malware, it's because they invariably did something foolish (like downloading something clearly dodgy, or being lazy and not keeping their computer up to date and dismissing all those 'it's time to upgrade!' dialogs it keeps bringing up).

I think it's impractical to have an OS with the flexbility of a Mac OS, Windows or Linux desktop and have the computer to be able to tell what's harmful behaviour and what isn't. That's the sort of thing advocates DRM in the hardware and the OS tout (quite reasonably) as one advantage of signed software. Personally, I'd rather not go down that route, and would rather expect people to exercise some common sense. They will soon learn if you restrict their net access when they misbehave.

As I mentioned though, that's not to say desktop OS's couldn't strike a much better balance without being too disruptive (or in the case of Vista, less disruptive).

Re:Trying to care

[inviolet]

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.

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.

Re:ISPs have to be the solution

[PeeAitchPee]

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:fix the cause not the symptom

[mpe]

The war on drugs is a miserable failure. So please find another parable

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.

Re:ISPs have to be the solution

[jeffasselin]

We don't need more laws, we simply need better laws written by people who actually understand the technology that needs to be regulated.

Re:And this will only get worse

[joto]

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.

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.

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.

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!

I'd be happy

[kennylogins]

If I could just stop the US Postal Service from spamming me.

Re:ISPs have to be the solution

[ball-lightning]

I'm not so sure about that. Yes, people are lazy, but switching to a different ISP is more of a hassle than running a virus/malware scanner; even if you're really computer-unsavvy, you'll probably have a child, sibling, cousin or friend who knows a bit more about computers and can do it for you.
 
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 employed fixing computers and I can certainly say running a virus/malware scanner AFTER the computer is already infected almost never works except for the weakest of bugs. The malware out today often takes control of the entire computer, infecting or replacing system of application files (explorer.exe, notepad.exe).
 
People have often asked me what Antivirus program to use to clean up their computer, and the best analogy I can come up with is this: Using antivirus software to remove a virus is akin to using a condom to cure an STD. IT's already too late.
 
What really needs to be done is consumer education, and the will to go after the people who profit from these botnets, legally. Once the profit motivation is gone, so will the 'nets.