techradar.com — As the professor of security engineering at Cambridge University, Ross Anderson is one of the founders of security economics as an academic discipline. Perhaps more impressively, though, he wants your ISP to send you cash every time you get spam.
Jan 5, 2009 View in Crawl 4
Closed AccountJan 5, 2009
Who is going to pay every time some s**tty WordPress site is compromised and used to spam?
honoredmuleJan 6, 2009
I subjected my mother to it...now she actually uses her computer.On Windows, she was terrified to actually do or try anything, and for good reason. How she managed to break the computer so frequently and thoroughly I'll never know, but in the end, she wouldn't even check her email. On Ubuntu, I set up some automatic backups and told her that if she wasn't being asked for her account password, she could do no wrong. Two years later, and the computer has become her primary source of entertainment; (stupid) games, movies, TV shows from torrents, email, chat, and word processing are all on her regular repertoire. She's even comfortable keeping her computer updated and does so, and uses VLC in place of her TV and DVD player, which she also manages to regularly break. She's still completely incapable of using a search engine or visiting a /new/ website, but in all fairness, the web is fairly chaotic to the truly tech-illiterate.I'm a heartless monster, I know.
maz2331Jan 6, 2009
No, you gained root to the honeypot posing as mom's box. Instead of SSH-ing to "mom" you actually interfaced with a well-disguised honeypot (mom.crackwhore) that sent your packets to /dev/null while simultaneously infecting you with a really nasty virus known as Mom.FakeHo.Vengeance.h
sandertonJan 6, 2009
@smackshawWe're intending to do just that.
virtualmodeJan 6, 2009
Yes, you'll get millions for spam. Just a few things: 1) you'll get them from a Nigerian bank; 2) they need a few dollars from you before sending your millions...
hermmunsterJan 6, 2009
We should be suing the advertisers that have their ads pop up from adware/spyware. Someone has to pay and the government doesn't seem capable of removing the adware and other malware. The direct money to these outfits are the advertisers. We should be able to sue them.