p2pnet - rss feed: Sabotage, extortion, blackmail
p2pnet.net News:- Sabotage involving extortion, blackmail and fraud. E-mails to an enemy - £50 (about $91). Hijack internet browsers to display a porn site - around £200 (about $365). A full-blown assault on a website, between £8,000 (about 14,575) and £12,000 921,862).
That’s the picture painted by Britain’s The Independent in a story by Charles Arthur slugged Hackers will settle your scores online. It centers on “zombie” computers which look normal but which hold back doors which allow hackers to control them remotely.
“However, many people are ignorant of those dangers,” says the story. “There are hundreds of thousands of such virus-infected ‘zombie’ machines worldwide, security experts reckon. They are organised into separate groups, controlled by the owners of the viruses which infected them.
“The most valuable use now for such ‘zombie’ systems is to launch ‘distributed denial of service’ (DDOS) attacks on websites which have to offer online services, particularly betting and financial organisations. The DDOS uses the zombie machines to make the internet equivalent of a phone call - and then hang up immediately. With thousands of machines each doing this hundreds of times per second, the site is overwhelmed by fake requests.”
Arthur quotes Gerard Lopez, chief executive of Securewave, whose clients include the UK’s Ministry of Defence, as saying attackers use virus programmers to “deploy a zombie network to order” and, “Depending on how well-known the website is, how big an attack is required, and what the person who controls the zombies chooses to charge, any site can be taken out for £8,000 to £12,000.”
August 1st, 2004 at 8:16 am
ISPs have the ability to easily detect some infected computers by scanning the ports of all computers on the network for known viruses, and /or monitoring behavior.
This is already what some isps and networks are doing to identify and lock down P2P usage. The same techniques could easily be used to hunt down virus infected computers.
That’s just my prediction - that in the future it will be the isps that will be using antivirus methods. There are just too many pc novices out there posing as easy targets to infect. Maybe instead of obsessing with adherence to the DMCA, the isps could be looking out for us. Just like when your credit card company might approach you to ask if all those cash advances made in Nigeria yesterday are really yours. ISPs could certainly notice if a computer suddenly starts maxing out its bandwidth sending email, scanning addresses, or pinging servers, or doing other erratic behavior that often signals a virus infection.
However - the victory, while easy, may be short. The next generation viruses just might apply a lesson learned from P2P and start using randomized ports, encryption and/or spoofed addresses as an evasive tactic.