Chinese Worm Creator Gets High-Paying Job Offer In Prison 148
martinsslaves writes "The recently imprisoned creator of China's worst computer virus ever (worm.whboy) has now been offered a job paying millions of yuan from his prison cell. He's actually been offered several, and one of the companies that has offered him the position of Technology Director was actually affected by his virus. The General Manager there now believes the virus writer may have just been 'led astray'. The media is reporting that author Li Jun originally wrote the virus due to frustrations over being jobless. 'So far, about 10 network companies across the country have offered jobs to Li, whom they regarded was a "precious genius," the report said citing Li's lawyer Wang Wanxiong. Li's cyber bug, which earned him about 145,000 yuan after selling it to other hackers from December 2006 to February this year, can prevent infected computers from operating anti-virus software and all programs using the "exe" suffix.'"
This used to happen in the US (Score:3, Interesting)
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I wonder how many look back and wish they'd have taken jail...
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As a kid I went to church with an FBI computer crime guy (and his kid) and knew a good chunk of the group that replaced the SPM - a group called the Midwest Pirates Guild - from school friends and hanging out on BBS's, so I heard a lot of info from both sides. It was kinda weird kn
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Oh god... I predict "resume spam" soon (Score:4, Funny)
To that end, instead of "stocks" in images and PDFs, I predict the next round will be resumes flying around!
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All these stories of ex-'hackers' getting highly paid jobs for multi-national corporations as security advisors is bordering between fiction and fairy tales.
It doesn't work like that; it only happens to Kevin Mitnick and (IN)FAMOUS hackers...
it wouldn't happen to you....
perhaps I'm wrong though.....?
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You're wrong. I knew someone in the early 90's that finally got caught hacking into the systems of a security company after a decent amount of playing cat and mouse. They gave him two choices - work for us (at quite a nice salary) or sit in a cell.
Needless to say, he chose the job.
Re:Oh god... I predict "resume spam" soon (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Oh god... I predict "resume spam" soon (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd feel a lot safer if a burglar who was extremely good at lock picking was unable to pick the locks I was using. Same goes for security, if you have someone who is a professional hacker trying to penetrate your system you're going to find problems a lot faster than if you just have another White Hat, whose more concerned with patching holes than finding them, looking around.
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Burglars and ethics (Score:2)
Perhaps I'm different from you, but I'd feel much better knowing that a convicted lock-picking burglar had nothing to do with the design or manufacturing process of a lock that was on my house.
Once they burgle someone, they demonstrate beyond any doubt that thei
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The Black Hat shouldn't be able to ch
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Devs write something, black hats find holes do lots of damage and make some profit, white hats have to find the black hats using the holes and then fix it. Seems to make more sense to fix the problem at the Devs rather than hiring known criminals. This whole white hat black hat c
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I've occasionally wanted to learn more in-depth about security threats and how to compromise systems in order to be better protected against such threats, but obviously not to create a worm or virus (unless it was to patch up systems - vigilante law ftw!)
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A great number of devices run from PCs and are connected to the net. That is how the MRI, CT scanner, ultrasound, x-ray machines, etc, etc, send images and information from one place to another be it on site or off site specialists. Disrupting the monitor would kill someone wh
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That's nonsense! That's like asking one serial killer for help finding another serial killer.
You fly back to school now, little Starling.
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Re:Oh god... I predict "resume spam" soon (Score:5, Funny)
mod parent up (Score:1)
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Hey, while we're at it, we could extend this to to West, also... Cou
You certainly are from the USA... (Score:2)
Of course I do not expect people from the USA to understand... I mean, what can you expect from a country where murder is a "fair" punishment.
Accomplices (Score:2, Interesting)
(Oh and I for one welcome our burning joss stick wielding, cute and cuddly Asian overlor^W, um, IT guys...)
Pfft (Score:1)
Don't all viruses do that nowadays, seems like a standard practice to me.
<blockquote>and all programs using the "exe" suffix.</blockquote>
so.... how did windows boot?
Re:Pfft (Score:5, Informative)
IIRC, the virus modified the registry entries which tell Windows how to handle
I remember at work someone convincing me it was a good idea to copy the
Re:Pfft (Score:5, Funny)
- Eugene Xavier Edwards
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Dead easy solution though - just located regedit.exe, renamed it to regedit.com, fired it up and got fixing.
Maybe not so new (Score:5, Funny)
Navidad [symantec.com] did kind of the same thing but it seems to be a coding mistake more then the intended purpose of the virus.
Just for the record: I didn't read the article.
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He was hired later as a WGA expert-developer.
well yeah (Score:5, Insightful)
which means 2 things:
1. there is no security in an environment where the security doesn't get challenged and defeated every now and then. or get's challenged, and the fallout kept secret
2. go ahead and make virii and worms. just make damn sure the payload is harmless or simply annoying. if the worm this guy wrote did something really nasty, you can be sure he wouldn't be getting kudos and job offers
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2. He sold the code to criminals who have no doubt used it for something 'really nasty'?
I like to play devil's advocate a bit, but this guy really does seem like a prick rather than someone who wants to be helpful.
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I swear to God people need to get over this moronic idea that hiring hacker
uh (Score:2)
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crime pays (Score:1, Insightful)
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What if he wasn't led astray... (Score:1)
what if he wasn't and is just manipulating the authorities to get himself back online?
what are they going to do if he creates another worm, while in prison?
I would hope this is an unlikely scenario but it is one worth considering...
first thought (Score:1)
He did this because he couldn't get a job? (Score:2)
He did this because he couldn't get a job? Maybe he should get a life instead.
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The familiar meme evolves (Score:3, Funny)
2. In despair, write a Windows worm.
3. PROFIT.
4. Get caught, go to jail.
5. ???
6. PROFIT.
Bad idea? (Score:2, Interesting)
Sorry, but taking your discontent out on scores of innocent victims does not strike me as merely being led astray. At best, it shows a complete failure to consider the consequences of your actions. At worst, it shows that your personali
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theese times though, many people feel rewarded if they have the opportunity
to be employed and exploited.
=>he did not go astray... the society did - "the society is to blame" (c) Monty python
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On the chance that you weren't making a joke, I have to respectfully disagree. Keeping your citizens gainfully employed is a good idea for any government (otherwise anarchy and rebellion arise). However, I don't believe it's a human right. It is the responsibility of each person to strive to educate and locate themselves in such a way as to gain employment that takes care of life's necessities. It is the responsibility of society (if they have the means) to assist other membe
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his origins, colour (put your custom discrimination here), nor because of one's criminal (and served) history.
A man has a right to work and have a job, that's all, it does not mean governments should secure & offer it.
now, a company says he rocks and offers 130k$. You say he'll feel rewarded as other sous-payed chineese suits get 10k$.
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Back when the species could earn a living from farming, a job wasn't a human right. It was something everyone could do, and had to do to survive.
Now what? Can you go off, buy a ridiculously priced piece of land and farm a living off of it? You have to be able to get a job.
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Bad idea for whom? The Chinese get a good virus writer to make more, as munitions against someone. It encourages others to try. This is no different than England knighting or ennobling "pirates" who took the Spanish treasure fleets or the Silver Train from inland South America, back in Henry VIII's or Elizabeth I's reigns. For that matter, it is no different than pardoning a successful bandit and employing hi
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Good point, but even then, I still think it's a bad idea. Somebody like that will sell out to the highest bidder, which can easily turn a great asset into a traitor. It's kind of like making explosives. You know that at some point there will be an accident during production, and that it will be really bad. Are the risks worth the returns? You have to do the math.
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This is China we are talking about. The run by a different set of rules. Corruption is common and ethics is often considered when we are talking about the bottom line. You a
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Sounds like graduate school.
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The Chinese will learn, too, eventually... (Score:5, Insightful)
You will not get a job offer here for writing a virus. No reputable IT sec company will touch you with a 10 foot fiber cable. Yes, you obviously have the skill, but you lack the morals not to use it for what you've done.
What is really lacking in today's IT world is lectures and courses about the topic. Do you see many universities teach you something about malware? How to exploit a system? How to look for security holes? Yes, very controversial topic, but it's necessary. I mean, where are you supposed to learn that? Self study takes a long, long time, time you don't have in today's IT sec world where what you learn today is dead weight in a month. And, well, self study is usually only done by people who have an interest in applying that knowledge, and rarely for good...
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All I am saying is that it is hard to decipher if the ethical concerns with an individual hacker were present before they had the skill or if the ethics are merely a result of happenstance.
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Malware, though, strikes predominantly "civilian" targets. And with the advent of botnets like the Storm net, the net itself. And, sorry, with this on the table, you cannot tell me that the ethics
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The anti-malware community is a wee bit zealous. Sure, some might have written some kind of malware some long, long time ago in a life far, far away from the one they live now (talk about double standards, I know...), but as far as I'm aware, nobody ever did it for money. And a lot of them would eat you alive if you did tha
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Yes, because every day we hear how ethical the big companies are here in the West. Our big companies would never abuse monopoly positions, would never swindle share holders, would never abuse their staff, would never seek every way possible to avoid paying taxes, would never rip off their customers, would never fix prices, would never use scare tactics, would never spread lies and disinformation about competitors, would n
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Our big companies would never abuse monopoly positions, would never swindle share holders, would never abuse their staff, would never seek every way possible to avoid paying taxes, would never rip off their customers, would never fix prices, would never use scare tactics, would never spread lies and disinformation about competitors, would never spy on competitors or their own staff, would never collude with their own government to break the law, would never work with an oppressive regime just for profits...
Being able to trust your employees not to steal and sell hundreds of thousands of customer credit card numbers to the highest bidder has nothing to do with corporate morality or lack thereof.
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Um... yes? Actually, where I go there's an entire CS Masters concentration dealing with the subject along with digital forensics topics...
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Offered a job for your crime (Score:3, Interesting)
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on hiring the insecure and the vengeful (Score:3)
You hire a guy with a record with of lashing out against the world when he meets with life's frustrations. What next? Do you offer him lifetime job security and rebuild your IT infrastructure every time he twitches?
Something to be concerned about (Score:2)
As a result of this, paying hackers and cyber-terrorists(which is really what worm creators are) for their expertise in this sort of program is a VERY VERY bad thing. The culture
Inspiration! (Score:1)
Communism? (Score:1)
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Basically, China is an oligarchical state that gives lip service to the theories of people who are pretty much discredited: Mao, Lenin, Marx. For lack of a better mantra, they've stuck with it, since they can punish you if you argue with it and they've printed all the textbooks in Red already. There's nothing more comforting than being able to say you're a revolutionary without having to creat
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It is a communist country (Score:1)
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Give him a job only after... (Score:3, Interesting)
But only after he has spent MANY years in jail, and has reimbursed all the people who lost work and data directly resulting from the virus being on all the computers affected by this crime.
So if this criminal has written and released a bit of secret code that wipes out data a hard drive, then he (always a he) should be required to compensate for the cost of collecting and entering this data. He must also be responsible for loss of income and profit in all the companies infected by his virus code.
If he is still interested in coding after all the effort and expense that he must do to correct the bad effects of his deliberate action of writing and releasing a destructive virus, then he should be allowed to do so.
But not until all the compensation has been made. It doesn't matter if this criminal is a coding genius, we can always get the same results from having more ordinary people working on the same coding problem as a lone genius.
What I'm saying is that regardless of any individual's coding skills, if this individual causes millions of dollars of damage, he should not be allowed to work in this industry.
Chinese Worm Creator Gets High (Score:2)
What? No military contract? (Score:1)
What about next time he gets frustrated? (Score:1)
a) get over it?
b) do something harmful?
Good luck giving him access to your IT system.
Oblig "It's a Wonderful Life" (Score:2)
And all companies are evil (Score:2)
So the companies that are offering this kind of money are the companies that want to use spyware technology to boost their own revenues. In China, if you write a virus by your own, you are a criminal; if you write a virus as a company, it's called a "product".
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Only in China?
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Probably the same old story - couldn't get past HR to talk to anybody with a clue.