Dutch Police Takedown C&Cs Used By Grum Botnet 45
wiredmikey writes "Dutch authorities have pulled the plug on two secondary servers used by the Grum botnet, a large botnet said to produce about 17% of the world's spam. According to researchers from FireEye, the backup C&C servers were located in the Netherlands, and once word of their existence was released, Dutch authorities quickly seized them. While any C&C server takedown is a win, the impact may be minimal, as the two primary servers are fully active, and the datacenters hosting them are unresponsive to fully documented abuse reports. That being said, FireEye's Atif Mushtaq noted that the botnet does has some weak spots, including the fact that Grum has no failback mechanism, has just a few IPs hardcoded into the binaries, and the botnet is divided into small segments, so even if some C&Cs are not taken down, part of botnet can still remain offline. The removal of the C&C servers shines light on how quickly some law enforcement agencies work, given that proof of their existence is just over a week old."
Re:DUTCH ARE ALWAYS TOO ROLLING STONED !! (Score:5, Funny)
The quality of first post trolls has really decreased in the last few years.
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Re:how about kicking infected machines offline? (Score:4, Insightful)
Your post advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) 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
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(x) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(x) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
(x) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
(x) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
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1. It will, if implemented in the manner described, stop any computer identified as sending malicious traffic. Not for two weeks
2. This isn't about email filtering at all. This is about punitively disconnecting people from the net if their computers are shitty all over the place. If not adopted as law, it is true many will simply jump ship to an unfiltered ISP. If adopted as law, then they will be stuck. Yes, it will hurt; it is designed to.
3. Laws would need to be passed. See above. I would love to know wh
Re:how about kicking infected machines offline? (Score:4, Funny)
2. It's packet filtering (a firewall dropping all packets).
3. Yay, more laws! Let's just ignore the places where it will directly contradict existing laws.
4. Because the non-solution doesn't stop spam via. open relays.
6. Profit is a motivation for finding workaround or other methods.
8. Oh, your University did it so it must be a great idea for the entire Internet? Gotcha.
9. You are again missing the point.
10. Yes it is.
11. I do not trust my ISP to not fuck up something as complex as detecting a remote malware infected server and firewalling it effectively.
In short: you're wrong.
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What i would like to see is a Disc Builder that has
1 a self booting Anti-[redacted]ware program
2 a Patching program (like WSUSOffline)
3 a Ninite type speedloader
4 a set of "Gold" install files for Windows (to be used if the OS is trashed completely)
5 a Keyfinder and basic backup program
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>>quickly some law enforcement agencies work, given that proof of their existence is just over a week old.
Young agency?
Brainless editor.
But then I repeat myself.
A&A (Acronyms&Abbreviations) (Score:2)
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I thought C&C was the game Command And Conqouer. Lost of Fun with that one
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And I thought they were talking about C & C Music Factory.
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I had to look up "C&C"
You must be new here.
for those who don't know
I think you'll find that few don't. Now, if you're talking about a cop here, don't say LEO because to us nerds, that's Low Earth Orbit. As someone else pointed out, the "botnet" part gives it away. Would we have to spell out IBM, RAM, or DoS? This is a specialized site. We're nerds. We don't need to spell out C&C for a botnet any more than a law enforcement publication would feel the need to explain what an LEO is, even though it wo
Why not blackhole those datacenters? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm surprised there's not more voluntary cooperation among ISPs to blackhole unresponsive datacenters hosting botnet command infrasturcture.
Is the money for hosting that kind of stuff that good, or is it one of those semi-political things where those data centers are in a country like Russia where the difference between organized crime and the government depends on what time of day it is?
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Then again, it might not actually have much of an effect at all. I recall a similar "name and shame" exercise after a U
Time to be an arse... (Score:3)
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I can has chezeburger?
Don't blame the submitter too much. He might not be a native speaker (I'm sure I sound like an idiot when speaking Thai or Spanish). All your base are belong to us.
Blame the editor. Editors are supposed to be good at grammar, and I've had /. submissions completely rewritten on acceptance.
I see a plan: (Score:4, Interesting)
2. Watch Anonymous DDoS them so hard the host will have to choice but to kick them to protect the rest of their datacenter.
And the best part is that the operators of the servers have no legal recourse at all, because that would mean revealing their identities.
What rest of their data center? (Score:2)
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unrespunonsive to fully documented abuse reports. (Score:2)
How do they respond to cruise missiles? Or a squad of SEALS with sachel charges? Or even just blackholing of all their IPs?
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Send some stealth tanks to find the source of the missiles, follow up with APCs and Tick Tanks.
Flame tanks.
Chemical missile.
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OMG they took down GrummelNet!? (Score:2)
Now where am I going to get my hyperdestructive upgradeable weaponry!? There are no Gadgetron offices in this galaxy and I really don't want to be stuck using MegaCorp's crap for self defense and taking down supervillains. Their household products are more dangerous than their pathetic weaponry! What am I supposed to protect myself with, a used B20 Crotchitizer?
The end of spam? (Score:3)
From the article:
"In my opinion, taking down the top three spam botnets—Lethic, Cutwail, and Grum—is enough for a rapid and permanent decline in worldwide spam level," he said. "We still have to deal with small players, but I am sure that, after seeing the big players being knocked down, they will retreat as well."
Very optimistic! There's too many colo/virtual host sites out there that simply don't give a rat's ass that large swaths of their
bandwidth and IP space are being used by spammers. They're everywhere! And I've given up telling them. Even "legit" ISPs
like Integra have routinely ignored my notices in the past, so I've simply given up, I haven't the time or inclination to help any
more. They're using spammers to help pad their bottom line.
Reduced, sure, but go away? And another big botnet will appear again in the future, I have no doubt at all.