What is Digg?26 Comments
- khafra, on 10/12/2007, -2/+14They are. Hacking has been terrorism for over a year now. Along with jaywalking.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9There ought to be a mandatory training course for all who want to buy a computer(or an Internet connection). Think about it, if everyone knew about viruses and worms etc., there would be no more zombie computers to distribute spam and DoS attacks. There would be no place for spammers and malicious hackers to hide.
- Murdats, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8I hate computer noobs but you cant deny they help us out
they put extra money into the industry
they create tech support jobs
they make people quit tech support jobs
they drive up the price of internet by having to hire so very many tech support people
they drive down the price of internet by giving them money
fine, so they give the industry money - Burmask, on 10/12/2007, -6/+12Treat them as terrorists and the coolness factor might subside.
- dagr8tim, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5What and computer maker's miss out on all the money from grandma, and perverted uncle bob?
The old addage "A fool and his money are soon parted" still describes the sitution. - sublime, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Yeah they sure blend in by DDOSing and sending out spam
The fact that they are moving away from IRC and on to P2P and encrypted control mechanisms is old news - shosterman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Must have Bandwidth!....Baaannnnddwidth!
- Ricter, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Send.... more.... paramedics...
- jaycliche, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5They are second place on the watch list. I can see it now...tortured into confessions of which computers are zombies.
- combatchuck, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4There have already been several very critical holes found in parts of OSX. People may have even exploited them. The real problem is Microsoft's lack of timeliness when patching holes. How long did it take them to patch the WMF exploit? Long enough for some other frustrated hackers out there to create a fix themselves. Apple may not be the fastest updater in the world, but they put Microsoft to shame. Their major security patches are out in days, as opposed to months.
I'm also going to tell you why you're going to get dugg down by a bunch of people. It isn't "MAC", it's "Mac" or "mac". MAC as an acronym (M.A.C.) means "Media Access Controller", or the hardware address of a network card. Mac people get seriously annoyed by that.
There are virus free computers all over the internet. Mine, for example. Also, every single BeOS or QNX machine. ;-)
(virii is not a word, xerox) - Burmask, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Like a drivers license where you have to pass a test. Good idea @captaineuphoria!
- catfish182, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3are you retarded? treat them as terrorists?
What does a terrorist and a hacker have in common?
you have no clue as to piracey and hacking and you are speaking with out really knowing the subject.
I usally dont beleive in personally attacking a person but in this case i am ok with it.
I dont think hackers should be treated as terrorists. If a hacker is cuaght then he should serve his jail term and i think the system should really push and show what happens when you get caught. case in point is operation site down. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Site_Down). There was a nfo site also that was real big for a while and when it was taken down (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_iSONEWS). the isonews.com site was taken over by the feds and it scared the hell out of scene members.
These two were big in the scene and scared many into quiting or into hiding.
But we should treat them like terrorists? treat them like people that want to kill tons of people for thier own ideals. yeah thats a hacker. next time think before you type. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Send the Geek Squad. So they can charge you $500 to re-format the hard-drive.
- xerox, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3i hate mac fan boys as much as the next, but catfish, you are an idiot. Mac's DONT get virii like a windows pc, even if you have people looking for exploits. The way the kernel, services, and userspace objects interact is just so much different. Mac's have that strong UNIX base, which helps them a lot.
- dbr_onix, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Not really, most people using (controlling) botnets generally use pre-made botnet clients, and since a lot of them use IRC, a lot of botnets use them..
Using P2P botnets wouldn't work, since it has to work behind NAT, although I do recall someone making a botnet based on WASTE.
Web based control seems so obvious I'm surprised it's not used as much (Acctualy, for all I know it is, but I've not heard of any web-based-botnet control systems). I recall a website that "encrypts" messages by making them look like spam, imagine how hard a control system that issues commands like that would be to notice on a large network (although the outbound traffic would be far more obvious)
Final thing, I really don't think this will be a huge threat to buisness' - Sure, someone could infect all the machines in their network, bute for DDoS attacks, it's would be as effective as infecting a single machine, since they are behind a single connection.
But, any buisness should have decent firewall rules inplace to prevent any traffic that could contribute to a DDoS attack. The only "evil" thing that it should be able to do is repeatedly load a website, but the network admins should check for unusaly large numbers of hits to a certain website, find what machine the requests are comming from, then, work out how the machine was infected, remove the application (or wipe the machine), and secure all the machines.
- Ben - Diabolickfugnu, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1There is a theory that people with interests other than learning sniff the ethernet in open wireless networks, only to steal identities. Personally I think if they go to all the trouble of falsifying passports, then there really isn't much of a need to do so.
The last time I looked up updates on an ethereal type of sniffer they were made by the department of homeland security (security updates I mean). I doubt it would really be terrorists who use zombies to try and take out DNS servers or redbacks ect. - Ricter, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Doh... my zombie joke fell on deaf ears...
- Cymrubeats, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1http://www.ecdl.com/publisher/index.jsp They could make that obligatory. :P
- yasth, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Dang Skippy.... Sir can you please take that laptop out of the bag it is wanted for questioning...
You think waterboarding is effective on humans you just wait till you try it on a laptop. Even the toughest toughbook will be telling you all it knows in minutes.
The whole making a pyramid of them doesn't work so well though. Even naked, the savages have no dignity you know? - rootcomputing, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@baalzebub
At some point though you have to think realistic, not everyone can switch to BSD or to a mac. Maybe to save yourself you could go with Linux or a mac, but in the corporate world there's just no way at all. Network administrators have enough trouble patching the systems they have now, let alone switching them out with a whole new structure.
One good point was brought up by someone who commented on the actual article and that was to develop some sort of task force to actually take reports on zombie computers. Now I realize that saying that contradicts what I said before about being realistic, but I do believe in a few years it will become a reality. The guy used a great example of when your house is robbed the police come to do a report to help find the suspect.
Shouldn't that be the same with a victim of a zombie computer? A trained person could come to the house/business and see if they can't track where the commands or being issued from.
"For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction." - nofxjunkee, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1They called IRC a relic... relic! Well to that I say relic my big hairy ass. You can log onto freenode or a plethora of other servers and get support or just simple answers for thousands of software projects (including PHP).
Within 2 minutes I was able to find out that PHP doesn't support late static binding, but might support something similar in PHP6. _2_ minutes on IRC! Then I went on with my work.
(note: php is a terrible choice if you really want to do OOP) - catfish182, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2quit saying switching to a MAC is a solution. Its only a way to get around virus' becuase no one writes worms for them.
jesus i hate MAC users that say " we dont get virus'"
get a couple of people looking for exploits on MACs and it will get hit like PC's.
the only virus free safe COMPUTER is one that isnt connected to the internet. - catfish182, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1I'm a idiot?
I didnt say they get the same as a windows PC. I said if people start looking for exploits they will get it like pc's. read before you comment.
exploiting unix is harder but if a person wants to exploit anything they will get in. - nuts&bolts, on 10/12/2007, -5/+3Make a better mousetrap.............create a better scripter
- baalzebub, on 10/12/2007, -5/+2does not matter now educated you are a vulnerable system is still a vulnerable system, but knowledge is always a good thing so i wont mod you down for having only a half-truth...
not using MS-Windows would work best, switching to a flavor of BSD or Linux is a good decision, or if you have the cash get a Mac from Apple... - mwcole, on 10/12/2007, -5/+1Send.... more.... bandwidth...
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