Storm Worm Evolves To Use Tor

An anonymous reader writes "Seems like the Storm botnet that was behind the last two waves of attacks is also responsible for this new kind of social-engineering based attacks, using spam to try and convince users of the necessity of using Tor for there communications. They 'kindly' provide a link to download a trojaned version of Tor. This blog entry has a link to the original post on or-talk mailing list which has some samples of the messages."

Re:Are we late to the party?

[VGPowerlord]

I'm still not sure why people would actually listen to that. I mean... why would anyone just download a random program from a website without looking up said program in, say, google to see what it actually does?

Re:Ummm.

[Colin Smith]

Seems a lot more advanced than most of the usual spam/bot/virus stuff I read about.

You mean... More intelligently designed?

 

Unlikely

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, if people would do crazy shit like that then we'd have botnets consisting of billions of computers... oh wait.

When your users are illiterate ...

[DrSkwid]

it is easier to infiltrate there[sic] communications.

Re:Are we late to the party?

[maxwell demon]

I'm still not sure why people would actually listen to that. I mean... why would anyone just download a random program from a website without looking up said program in, say, google to see what it actually does?

That's easy to solve. Just add a helpful comment to the mail saying:

If you are not sure if you should install this program, get more information at http://www.evil.org/malware/installer.exe!

Re:Who are the stormbot people?

[Colin Smith]

Damnit. The bad guys get all the best software!
 

Re:When your users are illiterate ...

[DrSkwid]

are you su're ?

time traveller from 1987 goes 20 years in future,

[circletimessquare]

gets a sneak peek at Slashdot headlines:

"hmmm, what is going on in the far off fantastical future of 2007?"

Bringing Science and Math Into Writing?

"Ah, an age old problem"

Libraries Defend Open Access

"Some sort of Fahrenheit 451 situation? has the government gone fascist? or the russians won the cold war?"

New Legislation Proposed For Nuclear Safety

"Ah! Chernobyl is still fresh in their minds! At least it seems we didn't nuke each other"

Storm Worm Evolves to Use Tor

"SWEET JESUS! DUNE IS REAL!? AND IN CAHOOTS WITH THE SCANDINAVIAN GODS? WHATR SORT OF SCIFI FANTASY FUTURE IS THIS!"

Need editors who EDIT

[The Monster]

Arguably, what is needed is the low-tech sort of spell-checker. Before we had automated computer programs, newspapers had people called 'copy editors' who would proofread the articles submitted by the reporters. They were looking not only for spelling, grammar, and usage problems, but they also would do fact-checking.

Perhaps we could make the distinction clear this way: A machine that sells soft drinks is often referred to as a 'vender', while the guy selling hot dogs is more likely to be called a 'vendor'. With that in mind, I have toyed with a similar convention for other verb+er nouns:

The person who checks spelling could be a spell-checkor, and the computer program would remain the spell-checker; the human surfing the Web would be a browsor, using a browser program. Programs such as vi or emacs would be editers....

It's got as good a chance of adoption as *bibyte does.

Now, if Cmdr Taco could just get editors who actually EDIT... Oh. He's the 'editor' who ran this story? Never mind.

Um... excuse you?

[Linkiroth]

Your link didn't work.

Real programmers don't need source code.

[sowth]

Oh come on! You aren't a real programmer. Everyone knows the binary is the source code. My uncle eddy doesn't even need those fancy disassemblers or debuggers. He edits memory by looking at LEDs and flipping dip switches. Now that is a real programmer.

Note to world: computer programs don't evolve

[gatkinso]

Human beings modify them, fix bugs, and upgrade them. Be it a computer virus, spreadsheet, or operating system.

Sometimes they intentionally break them.

But they don't spontaneously "evolve", "mutate", or any other such thing.

Christ.

Re:My question is..

[Anonymous Coward]

Your plan needs 20% more buzzwords to become truly plausible. I mean, you got in "crack the code", and "inject", and even "vectors", but I'm gonna need at least a "mainframe" and a "protocols" before I subscribe to your newsletter.

Re:Are we late to the party?

[Heembo]

LAUGH. A technique like this was effective in getting 60% of a section of IRS employees to give up their password. When I brought this up to my dad (who works there) his answer was, why, you want mine? here it is....