When I was a teenager I found it fun to intentionally infect myself with malware and try to study it. I know realize this wasn't the most responsible thing to do, as I wasn't in a sandboxed environment, but it was a great learning experience and taught me a lot about networking and security. One of the biggest malwares I ever managed to infect myself with was a bot, which caused my computer to become a zombie on a ~1…
Have you ever chatted with a hacker within a virus?
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Re: Have you ever chatted with a hacker within a virus?
#22To answer the title: yes. It was my freshman year of college and my first introduction to broadband in 1998. I discovered irc via mIrc and somehow somebody put something on my computer where they could control the mouse/keyboard. I watched the guy move the cursor around for a while then begin to type to him. He was cool, and told me how to prevent it from happening again.
Re: Have you ever chatted with a hacker within a virus?
#23Re: Have you ever chatted with a hacker within a virus?
#24When I was a teenager I found it fun to intentionally infect myself with malware and try to study it. I know realize this wasn't the most responsible thing to do, as I wasn't in a sandboxed environment, but it was a great learning experience and taught me a lot about networking and security. One of the biggest malwares I ever managed to infect myself with was a bot, which caused my computer to become a zombie on a ~1…
Perhaps a rather naive questions, but: were the username and pw transfered in plaintext?
Re: Have you ever chatted with a hacker within a virus?
#25Re: Have you ever chatted with a hacker within a virus?
#26Steve Gibson (grc.com) famously used chatroom credentials in a trojan he reverse-engineered to get in and chat with the bot maker. And, infamously, got DDOSed for it. Can't find the transcript now, which is a shame; I think he took it offline to let the intertubes cool down.
http://www.crime-research.org/library/grcdos.pdf I think this is what you are talking about, really interesting read if I remember correctly.
Re: Have you ever chatted with a hacker within a virus?
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Steve Gibson story was really interesting. He's a really cool guy, too. My botnet adventures happened around the same time as his, and I too was DDoS'd. We even exchanged a few e-mails about botnets and the script kiddie culture. Those were fun times.
Except when he went on record opposing the addition of raw-sockets to Windows XP saying it would help hackers and spell the end of the world. I remember clutching my Redhat CD, just in case raw sockets were banned ;-) http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/25/steve_gibson_really_...
Re: Have you ever chatted with a hacker within a virus?
#28Re: Have you ever chatted with a hacker within a virus?
#29When I was a teenager I found it fun to intentionally infect myself with malware and try to study it. I know realize this wasn't the most responsible thing to do, as I wasn't in a sandboxed environment, but it was a great learning experience and taught me a lot about networking and security. One of the biggest malwares I ever managed to infect myself with was a bot, which caused my computer to become a zombie on a ~1…
I'd probably do the same, upon discovering that one of my bots had become sentient.
Re: Have you ever chatted with a hacker within a virus?
#30Alternative title: Amateur virus analyst does not take necessary precautions, gets pwned by virus author.