Harmony Central Hacked ....

[fronobulax]

... When I was still doing the college thing last year, I did a paper on botnets.

For those of us who never really understood Edlin, could you explain what a botnet is and how it works? Thankee ... J

I haven't written any papers on the subject (although after averaging one lost drive every 12 months I have either lost all my papers or they are safely backed up) but I'll try.

Suppose you have a computer. I manage to install some nasty software on it that lets me take control of it. Your computer will do my bidding. How does it know my bidding? In general, as a bad guy, I will establish some kind of command and control channel. Perhaps your computer will contact a web site to receive my instructions. Perhaps it will listen to a chat channel for my commands. Often Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is the channel of choice. Geeks use it (instead of AOL Instant Messenger). It is fairly easy to configure and communications can be easily encrypted.

Suppose I have thousands of computers waiting to do my bidding and I can send one command via IRC to get them all to do it. That is one simple example of a botnet. "bot" as in robot and "net" as in network.

If I have a bunch of computers set to do my bidding there are many things I can do. I can tell them all to try and connect to a web site in hopes that the traffic will overload it and bring it down. Distributed Denial of Service attack.

I can send each one of them 100 email addresses and have them send SPAM or infected email to each address.

I can sell you access to my botnet so you can perform your special project in a way that is hard to trace back to you.

And so on...

If you know of SETI @ Home or one of the other efforts where people volunteer use of their computer to help solve an "interesting" problem then you can see the similarities to a botnet. At some technical level both are just distributed computing systems. Participation in a botnet, however, is usually not voluntary and often unknown to the owner of the hardware. The sort of tasks botnets are called on to perform are also less beneficial to society.

 

[Dr Izza Plumber]

One dirt bag posing as a member, had a virus code attached, which sped up the hard drive to failure. However, I had dual hard drives, plus I was able to retrieve all My data from the first drive.
I repaired the old girl, but realizing that she needed some rest time, I bought a new pc on black friday, complete with windows 7, which is nothing but a warmed up version of vista.

My advice to forum admins is to watch the signature boxes on new registrant's profiles for tiny, (almost invisible) code. We currently screen all registrants with net tools, even before We send a request for contact info. Also, if You are not already checking emails addy's and IP's, here's a valuable FREE tool resource for that purpose: http://network-tools.com/
~ Izza

1) Do you happen to know the name of the virus as characterized by any of the AV vendors? I know several viruses that generate extreme disk activity as a side effect but one that does it out of spite in at attempt to induce hardware failure is new to me.

2) I like Windows 7 better than Vista to the point that I would recommend using Windows 7 on a new machine rather than downgrading to Windows XP but there is still a big "so what?" and "why bother?" factor. Gee, since we need to stop political threads about global warming and climate change, maybe we should introduce the Operating System Holy Wars? At least we could tie those to the Topics at Hand because of recording and sound editing software.

3) Thanks for the link to tools. It's nice to have them all in one place and somewhat idiot proofed.

I really don't know anything about that Virus, but the tech who checked My pc knew about it. I actually could not locate the virus using My avira program. The tech informed me that code for new viruses is written almost on a daily basis.

 

[fronobulax]

I really don't know anything about that Virus, but the tech who checked My pc knew about it. I actually could not locate the virus using My avira program. The tech informed me that code for new viruses is written almost on a daily basis.

Thanks. The tech is correct in there is a lot of new stuff coming out. Just Google "day zero" or "zero day" for exploits. However there is also a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) being sown and the tech's comments don't quite square with the sources I follow. There is genuine debate as to a) whether software can be written to permanently damage hardware; b) whether such software, if it exists, has actually been observed "in the wild" and c) whether the capability to write such software, if it exists, resides at the level of nation-states as opposed to individual hackers.

Personally I'm not certain why point a) is being debated but your experience, if correctly interpreted, would demonstrate b) and make c) moot - unless, of course, you have personally p*ssed off the Chinese or the Russian Mafia.

 

[capnjuan]

... When I was still doing the college thing last year, I did a paper on botnets.

For those of us who never really understood Edlin, could you explain what a botnet is and how it works? Thankee ... J

I haven't written any papers on the subject...

Paper not necessary ... thank you. J

 

[Default]

Don't forget the Ukraine!
Remember when Estonia was knocked off the internet? Turned out it was perpetrated but a ethnic russian Estonian college student...
I believe strongly that there are nations contributing to this as well as criminals.