Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed. The word criminals would be more accurate and less pejorative.
"Russian" is pejorative?
Any word can be a pejorative if used as such, you hacker.
Please do not take down the Sality botnet
111–120 of 148 posts
Re: Please do not take down the Sality botnet
#112So why can't those nice guys from the FBI go and do it already? It's so easy to replace sites when piracy is involved...
Because it is against the law. Taking down a site used by a criminal (or someone they believe is criminal) is within their purview. Making unauthorized changes to the computers of an innocent 3rd party (even minor changes, like removing a botnet infection) is against the law.
Re: Please do not take down the Sality botnet
#113The guy takes all the time to put this together, write this up, and is perfectly ok with the outcome, but instead of going to a coffee shop and doing this himself, he spends a lengthy amount of time writing up instructions and giving the criminals a chance to fix their injection problems before someone can take down the botnet. Baffling. Not only that, but this guy seems to know what he's doing and instead of someone…
I apologize in advance for the tone, but as a Russian I have a question - are you racist? Since Sergey Brin and Mila Yovovich are "russians", do you imply that Google and Hollywood are part of this botnet? The most famous hacker is Kevin Mitnick [american] and most recent hackers charged/arrested by FBI are also american citizens. Why don't you change "russians" to "americans"? Or may be "new_zealanders" [Kim dot com…
Fun though it always is to accuse people of racism.
"The W32.Sality family of threats has been around for some time as the first versions surfaced in 2003 and may have originated in Russia"
http://www.symantec.com/security_response/writeup.jsp?docid=...
Re: Please do not take down the Sality botnet
#114So why can't those nice guys from the FBI go and do it already? It's so easy to replace sites when piracy is involved...
because the actions required to do so are illegal. This isn't about replacing sites or controlling the C&C machines. That's relatively easy.
To 'take down' the bots in the fashion of the OP means you upload the AVG removal tool so that the bots grab it at some point in their update cycle and run it.
What you've done here is arrange to run code on the infected machines that the owner of the machine is unaware of. Code that is intended to alter software on that machine, and that is illegal in exactly the same way as infecting the machine with the bot virus in the first place.
As the machine's are in the main unidentified and spread all over the world, no one legal entity FBI, SOCA, Interpol etc covers them all within their jurisdiction, or can target only the machines with in it, so applicable warrants and permissions would be practically impossible to obtain.
Re: Please do not take down the Sality botnet
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
I apologize in advance for the tone, but as a Russian I have a question - are you racist? Since Sergey Brin and Mila Yovovich are "russians", do you imply that Google and Hollywood are part of this botnet? The most famous hacker is Kevin Mitnick [american] and most recent hackers charged/arrested by FBI are also american citizens. Why don't you change "russians" to "americans"? Or may be "new_zealanders" [Kim dot com…
I agree that it is a prejudice and should be avoided, but it's not completely groundless: According to industry analyses, Russia accounts for about 35 percent of global cybercrime revenue, or between $2.5 and $3.7 billion. That’s wildly out of proportion with the country’s share of the global information technology market (which is around 1 percent). http://themoscownews.com/siloviks_scoundrels/20111121/189221... It'…
Yes, when I was setting up a server I eventually had to apply a separate and more draconian set of firewall rules to IP addresses in Russia and China to avoid my logs just filling up with Junk, failed logins , attempts to access shady looking URLs which did not exist and HTTP requests filled with fragments of shell or SQL script.
To be fair I'm sure this only represents a minority of the people in these countries but perhaps it is just that it is more lucrative there.
I imagine it's quite hard to earn a decent living in the west just by breaking into a few servers and sending out a bit of spam, in Russia it probably looks like an attractive get rich quick for anyone with tech skills.
Re: Please do not take down the Sality botnet
#116I am reminded of the "wine blocks" sold (legally!) during the prohibition, which came with the following warning: After dissolving the brick in a gallon of water, do not place the liquid in a jug away in the cupboard for twenty days, because then it would turn into wine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_State...
I can't help but think that must have tasted terrible!
Re: Please do not take down the Sality botnet
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not "due to" racism, it is racism. Prejudice based on ethnicity or nation of origin is racism.
No. "Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination". If it's based on the current social or economical situation of Russia, it's prejudice, but not racism. Remember that Russians are "citizens of Russia", not a particular ethnic group.
I applaud your efforts at education!
I observe however that their is an emergent definition of 'racism' which is quite a bit more broad than yours.
Basically it is this "Assuming specific or stereotypical attributes about an an individual or group, based on that individual or group's membership in a definable group."
This removes the typical restriction that it involve 'race specific traits' so things like 'Bankers are greedy criminals' or 'Christians are fascists' get reflected back as variations on the 'racist' meme. When ever that group membership nominally includes race it's considered racist by people who share that racial attribute.
Even the discussion we're having (and as an operations guy I see a lot of bad actors whose IPs originate in countries that were former parts of the USSR) we have to be careful to disentangle accusations of people of a region being bad, and regions which host infrastructure which is available to everyone, being used for bad. The Internet does many things and one of those things is create 'telecommuting criminals' who may easily be living in New Hampshire but hosting their C&C servers at a friendly ISP or EC2 equivalent in the Ukraine.
[edit typos]
Re: Please do not take down the Sality botnet
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of people from Eastern Europe are very sensitive about that sort of thing; Russia's domination of the USSR and various brutalities are still fresh in memory, and besides, referring to any Eastern European as a Russian is akin to calling someone from Guatemala as a Mexican. Some people are more sensitive about it than others. (I was born in Russia, and don't particularly care, but I'm aware of other people's sen…
Which brings up another quirk of humanity, which is we tend to hate the ethnic group that is the most similar to our own. Simply, you hate your neighbor, you don't hate someone on the other side of the world you've never interacted with. There certainly are many instances of people hating ethnicities very disimilar form them, but that happens after people from different parts of the world migrate close to each other.
Well, sure. Your neighbor is the one who waits an extra week to mow his lawn, which looks bad, and drags down everyone's property values. Your neighbor is the one whose dog pooped in your yard that one time.
I suspect that proximity has a great deal more to do with it than similarity. If your neighbor is actually significantly different than you (ugh, the weird smells from the strange food those people eat!) I would think it makes it even worse.
Re: Please do not take down the Sality botnet
#119The guy takes all the time to put this together, write this up, and is perfectly ok with the outcome, but instead of going to a coffee shop and doing this himself, he spends a lengthy amount of time writing up instructions and giving the criminals a chance to fix their injection problems before someone can take down the botnet. Baffling. Not only that, but this guy seems to know what he's doing and instead of someone…
I apologize in advance for the tone, but as a Russian I have a question - are you racist? Since Sergey Brin and Mila Yovovich are "russians", do you imply that Google and Hollywood are part of this botnet? The most famous hacker is Kevin Mitnick [american] and most recent hackers charged/arrested by FBI are also american citizens. Why don't you change "russians" to "americans"? Or may be "new_zealanders" [Kim dot com…
[deleted]
Re: Please do not take down the Sality botnet
#120I am reminded of the "wine blocks" sold (legally!) during the prohibition, which came with the following warning: After dissolving the brick in a gallon of water, do not place the liquid in a jug away in the cupboard for twenty days, because then it would turn into wine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_State...
california always one step ahead on the recreational stuff.