Microsoft Disables Kelihos Botnet 94
Trailrunner7 writes with an excerpt from an article in Threatpost: "Continuing its legal assault on botnet operators and the hosting companies that the criminals use for their activities, Microsoft has announced new actions against a group of people it contends are responsible for the operation of the Kelihos botnet. The company has also helped to take down the botnet itself and says that Kelihos's operators were using it not only to send out spam and steal personal information but also for some more nefarious purposes."
I fap to gay porn (Score:1, Informative)
I fap to gay porn.
Re:They could disable the majority of botnets (Score:2, Informative)
Bullshit. If you can just click on an email and this leads to your system being rooted, there's something fundamentally wrong with the software architecture. Same goes for ads on websites. There should never be any way of executing arbitrary code from an email or web site.
Re:They could disable the majority of botnets (Score:2, Informative)
Bullshit. If you have to do nothing but CLICK on the email, there is something wrong. Obviously, you can't prevent people from running dodgy executables without locking down the system entirely (requiring cryptographically signed executables, etc.), but that doesn't mean you have to make it easy for them either. This kind of thing is utterly impossible in Linux, and only happens in Windows because of the idiotic idea that you should allow arbitrary code to be executed directly from a website or email.
Sure, you could include dodgy.exe in an email and give moronic users instructions how to right-click to save it to disk, open a file manager, go find the file on disk, then double-click on it to execute it, but thanks to human laziness very few people are going to go to all that trouble just to see the naked photo, and quite a few will probably remember being told never to do such a thing anyway. But when you make it so automatic that they don't have to click on anything, and only have to VIEW the email and they're infected, or be redirected to a dodgy website, THAT is a fundamental flaw in software design.