Gregg Keizer wrote:
The late-2006 appearance of durable botnets was a tipping point in the back-and-forth battle against spammers, an industry analyst said Friday, who predicted that spam will continue to gain ground on defenses.
Assembled by a Trojan called SpamThru, the new botnets are tougher to bring down, says Paul Wood, senior analyst with MessageLabs, a message security and filtering service. "The advent of Trojans like SpamThru makes it possible for each bot in the net to learn about the location of other bots. When a bot goes down or the command and control channel is compromised, the other bots know about it."
In SpamThru's techniques, if a control server is shut down, the spammer can easily update the rest of the bots with the location of a new server as long as he controls at least one bot in the net. And if a specific bot is shut down, its spam load can be quickly shifted to another, as-yet-undiscovered, bot.
How much does spam cost the economy? Is it enough to justify a presidential "finding" for the CIA to "investigate" the people in charge?
"There is no "taboo" on using nuclear weapons." -Julhelm
What is Project Zohar? "On a serious note (well not really) I did sometimes jump in and rate nBSG episodes a '5' before the episode even aired or I saw it."- RogueIce explaining that episode ratings on SDN tv show threads are bunk
It seems that every so often I run across another article claiming that spam is going to get worse. On my email accounts, including the ones where I expect spam, I've yet to see that.
Wood also worries about a boost in "ransomware," the practice where criminals gain access to a computer, encrypt some or all of its data files, and then send e-mails demanding payment in return for the key that unlocks the documents.
I'd never heard of this before, but backups should protect you from this.
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bilateralrope wrote:It seems that every so often I run across another article claiming that spam is going to get worse. On my email accounts, including the ones where I expect spam, I've yet to see that.
On the contrary, most of the people I talk to have reported an increase in spam over the past six months.
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"you guys are fascinated with the use of those "rules of logic" to the extent that you don't really want to discussus anything."- GC
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"Viagra commercials appear to save lives" - tharkûn on US health care.
Darth Wong wrote:On the contrary, most of the people I talk to have reported an increase in spam over the past six months.
My Gmail account has shown a marked increase in the size of its spam folder recently and my university's email servers are currently overloaded due to the sheer amount of spam they have to process.
Uraniun235 wrote:How much does spam cost the economy? Is it enough to justify a presidential "finding" for the CIA to "investigate" the people in charge?
According to Wiki, please add salt -
The California legislature found that spam cost United States organizations alone more than $10 billion in 2004, including lost productivity and the additional equipment, software, and manpower needed to combat the problem.
Darth Wong wrote:On the contrary, most of the people I talk to have reported an increase in spam over the past six months.
My Gmail account has shown a marked increase in the size of its spam folder recently and my university's email servers are currently overloaded due to the sheer amount of spam they have to process.
Ditto. Over what seemed like overnight my gmail's spam increased from two or three hundred a month to two-three hundred per day.
"It's you Americans. There's something about nipples you hate. If this were Germany, we'd be romping around naked on the stage here."
I hadn't even noticed because Google's spam filter is so good, but my spam folder has doubled in size since the last time I looked at it.
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Uraniun235 wrote:How much does spam cost the economy? Is it enough to justify a presidential "finding" for the CIA to "investigate" the people in charge?
According to Wiki, please add salt -
The California legislature found that spam cost United States organizations alone more than $10 billion in 2004, including lost productivity and the additional equipment, software, and manpower needed to combat the problem.
That's enough for me. I say we unleash the CIA to go crack spammer skulls abroad.
"There is no "taboo" on using nuclear weapons." -Julhelm
What is Project Zohar? "On a serious note (well not really) I did sometimes jump in and rate nBSG episodes a '5' before the episode even aired or I saw it."- RogueIce explaining that episode ratings on SDN tv show threads are bunk
Xisiqomelir wrote:Wow, massive botnets comprised of compromised computers!
I wonder which OS they're using that could be so insecure.
Come off it. If Mac was somehow the OS of choice, hackers and malware writers would just compromise it instead. Lack of interest on the part of attackers doesn't equal impregnability.
Rogue 9 wrote:ICome off it. If Mac was somehow the OS of choice, hackers and malware writers would just compromise it instead.
This is the notion of security through obscurity. Do you have a positive proof instead of conjecture and insinuations? Please remember that we've yet to see a real OS X virus in the wild.
Rogue 9 wrote:ICome off it. If Mac was somehow the OS of choice, hackers and malware writers would just compromise it instead.
This is the notion of security through obscurity. Do you have a positive proof instead of conjecture and insinuations? Please remember that we've yet to see a real OS X virus in the wild.
How many OS X servers exist, out of curiousity?
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Rogue 9 wrote: Come off it. If Mac was somehow the OS of choice, hackers and malware writers would just compromise it instead. Lack of interest on the part of attackers doesn't equal impregnability.
this really isn't a very good argument
"There is no "taboo" on using nuclear weapons." -Julhelm
What is Project Zohar? "On a serious note (well not really) I did sometimes jump in and rate nBSG episodes a '5' before the episode even aired or I saw it."- RogueIce explaining that episode ratings on SDN tv show threads are bunk
OS X Server is not that commonly deployed, AFAIK. Linux and Windows Server are rather more popular solutions.
As far as Mac viruses go, Leap-A came out recently and there was the WLAN DOS attack. Secundia also indicates that there remain some unresolved security issues in OS X.
Uraniun235 wrote:
Rogue 9 wrote: Come off it. If Mac was somehow the OS of choice, hackers and malware writers would just compromise it instead. Lack of interest on the part of attackers doesn't equal impregnability.
this really isn't a very good argument
It's a fairly poor argument but ROI for Macintosh malware is significantly less than Windows due to the huge masses of poorly-administered and open computers.
As bizarre as it is for me to agree with Shep...the death penalty, or at the very least extremely harsh fines, does sound like the best way to handle this.
Well, it's more a trojan but it does attempt code injection into other applications.
Still, not a virus. I'm not going to get Leap-A by just sitting there, I'd have to go out and look for latestpics.tgz, try to open it, then click "accept" when it tried to run.
The attack was for Airport hardware, which hasn't been sold for years now.
Xisiqomelir wrote:Still, not a virus. I'm not going to get Leap-A by just sitting there, I'd have to go out and look for latestpics.tgz, try to open it, then click "accept" when it tried to run.
For that matter, viruses don't silently infect new systems either - they require user-action of some sort. Worms are the ones that self-replicate across networks.
this, my mistake. This isn't even malware, though.
Well, no, it was merely an example of a security issue on a Mac.
Come off it. If Mac was somehow the OS of choice, hackers and malware writers would just compromise it instead. Lack of interest on the part of attackers doesn't equal impregnability.
