Zeus Botnet Dealt a Blow As ISPs Troyak, Group 3 Knocked Out 156
itwbennett writes "Ninety of the 249 Zeus command-and-control servers were knocked offline overnight when two ISPs, named Troyak and Group 3, were taken offline. Whoever was behind the takedown 'just decided to knock out a large area of cyber-crime, and this was probably one of the easiest ways to do it,' said Kevin Stevens, a researcher with SecureWorks. As with the McColo takedown of just over a year ago, Troyak's upstream providers seem to have knocked it off the Internet, Cisco said in a statement. 'The ISP was "De-peered,"' Cisco said. 'Troyak's upstream network providers effectively pulled the plug on Troyak's router, refusing to transmit its traffic.'"
Good (Score:5, Insightful)
What about the other 150?
I have a difficult time understanding how Zeus is *still* around; it started in mid 2007! According to WP, it has more than 3.6 Million infected PCs.
There is no reasonable stance that defends the existence or the activities of botnets either legally or morally. How is it that we know there are 150 other command nodes, presumably that we can also discover their IP addresses, but law enforcement has been unable to bring them down?
While I understand there are differences in laws, and with what is legal and what is accepted in different jurisdictions, but this seems patently absurd. If an ISP provides service to a verified botnet control node, and refuses to quickly turn them off, I would expect immediate upstream action like this. Why hasn't this happened even more?
Re:Good (Score:4, Interesting)
From the article:
Troyak is based in Kostanay, Kazakhstan, according to whois records.
Taking down the servers is a political matter, not a technical one (in general). But I would imagine that clearly harboring illegal activity would be sufficient motivation for anybody. Imagine if we classified servers like we do countries that support terrorism?
But even if we got all 249, it's like playing whack-a-mole or cutting off the head of a hydra.
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> Imagine if we classified servers like we do countries that support terrorism?
Because that works so well...
Re:Good (Score:5, Informative)
And for once it WOULD be a good idea.
Just look at what happened to Blue Security. They put spam down so well that a pissed off spammer lobbed an electronic nuke at them.
The guys that took out Blue were able to do so because they had a freaking ARMY of computers. An army, by the way, that they built up through illegal means. Now, accumulating firepower through theft, that does sound like a form of terrorism to me.
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Now, accumulating firepower through theft, that does sound like a form of terrorism to me.
Despite what the talking heads on TV or the politicians have told you to think, terrorism does not mean "anything illegal" or "anything against the interests of the country". Terrorism is an activity that is designed to accomplish its goals through the use of fear and paranoia against the general population.
Stockpiling a supply of bombs does not make you a terrorist, using or threatening to use them against a target such as a school does.
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No, but using those assets in attacks against civilians (hell, even military/government) might count.
Naturally it's a slippery slope that makes censorship more convenient as a side effect.
Consider also, that the USAF has gotten into cyber-defense. That's the freaking AIR FORCE. Now, I must ask...why bother unless cyber-attacks actually have the potential to cause extensive damage?
Re:Good (Score:4, Interesting)
Pretty much obliterated Blue Security, I had to google them to figure out what the hell he was talking about. He used a fairly generic term, but the end result is the same.
Re:Good (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, a bunch of guys (spammers) from specialham decided that BlueFrog was working a bit too well at killing spam so they basically threw everything they had at Blue security while simultaneously launching a massive propaganda and FUD campaign online (where they made all sorts of unsubstantiated claims about Blue Security and the BlueFrog software).
This kind of behaviour from spammers is one of the reasons I wouldn't be the least bit upset if the top 10 spammers in the world were all found one morning with holes in their heads, hopefully it would at least dissuade others (and stop these particular asshats).
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All that needs to be done is force ISPs in other countries to stop peering with them.
"Force"? How do you propose we do that?
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Laws don't mean anything unless you enforce them.
Re:Good (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, most legit ISPs regardless of size tend to put a clause in their ToS about their customers not being allowed to do things that disrupt the network, and spamming and DDoS attacks seem like good enough reasons for claiming someone is disrupting the network. Hell, when I worked the abuse desk for an ISP we would warn residential customers after we got the first indication or complaint about them, disconnect them and send them a letter the second time and only reconnect when they contacted us and verified that they had fixed the problem, if there were any further complaints we would often just cut them off completely (sometimes giving them the option to present us with a receipt from a computer store showing that they'd had their computer looked at by someone there before finally cutting them off).
No reason to make this about laws that tell ISPs what they must police in their networks, if the respectable and serious ISPs start taking their own Terms of service seriously and actually act on them even when the customer is another ISP then we'd have a lot fewer problems with botnets and spam.
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Where did you learn about customer satisfaction? UbiSoft?
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You're assuming that most customers would not fix their equipment and that they would switch to another ISP, my experience tells me otherwise, most users will rather fix their own equipment than change ISPs.
Also, did you notice the second paragraph where I mentioned ISPs actually using these rules against other ISPs who are their customers? We're not talking about Bargain Bob's Discount Intarwebs here, we're talking about Level 3, TeliaSonera, Verizon, AT&T et al actually bothering to disconnect Bargain
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The same way Turkey took down YouTube (Score:2)
The same way Turkey took down YouTube
By pushing bogus BGP packets to the backbone routers you have access to. Only the routers the people who dislike botnets have administrative control over are not just inside Turkey.
-- Terry
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I believe you're thinking of Pakistan.
Re:Good (Score:4, Insightful)
Ya I'm not really seeing the victory here.
If 90 of their command and control servers are knocked off can't they just push an update out through one of their other 159 command servers to the botnet to add another 1000 potential command and control servers scattered around the internet?
The short answer? Money. (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the spammers and such are paying good money for such "bullet-proof" hosting sites.
Meanwhile, the more legitimate ISP's don't want to spend the money to block the command/control servers individually on their networks.
Re:The short answer? Money. (Score:4, Interesting)
Meanwhile, the more legitimate ISP's don't want to spend the money to block the command/control servers individually on their networks.
I suspect the "expense" they're afraid to incur would most likely be in the form of legal costs. Give a decent sysadmin any size list of culprits and he'll script a way to block them within a day, max. Fighting lawsuits, OTOH, is quite expensive, bogus or otherwise.
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This is called a pink contract.
http://catb.org/jargon/html/P/pink-contract.html [catb.org]
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It's true.
At one of my jobs the boss willingly hosts a spammer and gives him a couple subnets, a XEON and a few mbit of traffic and gets thousands from it.
It's pretty annoying because i've been instructed to deal with spamhaus over it all the time and one of these days they're going to call the companies bluff.
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I suspect that an _individual_ is being paid to risk losing his job if his _employers'_servers_ get kicked off the net.
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Not all the command nodes are in jurisdictions that are reachable. Some peer with larger carriers from behind borders where they are essentially untouchable.
Some may represent a large amount of income for there ISPs. Some may cross the palms of their upstreams.
Its hard to cut off an entire country just because the only backbone provider has one customer that bribes them to look the other way.
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Depends on if the country's government looked the other way with the backbone that was aiding and abetting.
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As I understand it, they don't use static IP addresses. They change their IP addresses frequently. They use all kinds of tricky schemes to shield their activities. It sounds like some of their schemes have been figured out lately and successfully attacked.
Re:Good (Score:4, Insightful)
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There is no reasonable stance that defends the existence or the activities of botnets either legally or morally.
"We can make money off of it" seems to work for a lot of people.
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With your line of reasoning, thepiratebay would have gone down and stayed down in spite of Swedish law and not because of it.
I can't say whether or not the laws of the lands in which the remaining servers reside make their existence illegal -- I hope they do or I hope they will soon -- but it is best to act within the law rather than outside of it.
I am glad that thepiratebay is still up and running. I find it useful. And if it means tolerating the existence of botnets for the same reasons, I could learn t
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Niney (Score:3, Informative)
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Niney you know kinda like sevenish.
Niney (Score:4, Funny)
Words (Score:5, Insightful)
knocked offline...taken offline....takedown...knock out.......have knocked it off..."De-peered,"'...pulled the plug... refusing to transmit
I'm sorry, you're going to have to repeat that; what happened? Were they somehow removed from the internet?
Re:Words (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Words (Score:4, Insightful)
TFA attributes this to "anonymous community action".
Of which there might be more if someone would be thoughtful enough to publicly post the IP addresses of the command and control nodes of major botnets on a regular basis.
Re:Words (Score:5, Funny)
Troyak and Group 3 were like car dealerships, who sold cars to evil customers, who ran car-botnets. The suppliers of Troyak and Group 3 decided to stop supplying cars to them, so they couldn't resell the cars.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
this has to be the worst car analogy ever.
Re:Words (Score:5, Funny)
this has to be the worst car analogy ever.
You might say it's like the Yugo of car analogies.
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this has to be the worst car analogy ever.
Yeah, it's like the AMC Pacer of car analogies.
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Which makes it the best. +5 insightful
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The ISPs that hosted these botnet control centers had their wires cut. The entire ISP is offline. None of the companies they send their internet traffic to will talk to them any more.
PININ' for the FJORDS?! (Score:3, Insightful)
knocked offline...taken offline....takedown...knock out.......have knocked it off..."De-peered,"'...pulled the plug... refusing to transmit
... IT IS A DEAD ISP! </cleese>
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Re:PININ' for the FJORDS?! (Score:5, Funny)
Mr Praline walks into a datacenter.
He walks to a desk where a sysadmin tries to hide below a tape rack.
PRALINE: Hello, I wish to register a complaint... Hello? Miss?
SYSADMIN: What do you mean, miss?
PRALINE: Oh, I'm sorry, I have a cold. I wish to make a complaint.
SYSADMIN: Sorry, we're closing for patch Tuesday.
PRALINE: Never mind that my lad, I wish to make a complain about this hosting service what I leased not half an hour ago from this very datacenter.
SYSADMIN: Oh yes, the Kazakhstan Big Blue Blade Server package. What's wrong with it?
PRALINE: I'll tell you what's wrong with it. It's offline, that's what wrong with it.
SYSADMIN: No, no it's connecting, look!
PRALINE: Look my lad, I know a dead host when I ping one and I'm pingin' one right now.
SYSADMIN: No, no sir, it's not dead. It's syncing.
PRALINE: Syncing?
SYSADMIN: Yeah, remarkable host the Kazakhstan Big Blue, beautiful rackmounting job, innit?
PRALINE: The rackmountin' don't enter into it - it's stone dead.
SYSADMIN: No, no - it's just syncing.
PRALINE: All right then, if it's syncing I'll sync with it. (shouts into cabinet) Hello Khaki! I've got a nice piece of Cat 6 for you when you wake up, Khaki!
SYSADMIN: (jogging rack) There it blinked.
PRALINE: No it didn't. That was you yankin' the wire.
SYSADMIN: I did not.
PRALINE: Yes, you did. (unplugs wire from cabinet, shouts into the end of the ethernet cable) Hello Khaki, Khaki (whips it against counter) Khaki host, wake up. Khaki. (throws it in the air and lets it fall to the floor) Now that's what I call a dead host.
SYSADMIN: No, no it's stunned.
PRALINE: Look my lad, I've had just about enough of this. That host is definitely depeered. And when I leased it not half an hour ago, you assured me that its lack of connectivity wad due to it being tired and shagged out after delisting a porn site.
SYSADMIN: It's probably pining for the fjords.
PRALINE: Pining for the fjords, what kind of talk is that? Look, why did it refuse to connect the moment I got home?
SYSADMIN: The Kazakhstan Big Blue prefers connecting via SSL. Beautiful host, lovely rackmounting.
PRALINE: Look, I took the liberty of examining that host, and I discovered that the only reason that its lights were blinking in the first place was that there was a flashlight taped inside the case.
SYSADMIN: Well of course it was taped there. Otherwise it would roll out the back and voom.
PRALINE: Look matey (picks up cable) this host wouldn't voom if I put four thousand volts through it. It's bleeding offline.
SYSADMIN: It's not, it's pining.
PRALINE: It's not pining, it's unplugged. This host is no more. It has ceased to be. Its license has expired. This is a late host. It's a brick. Bereft of electrons, it rests in peace. And if you hadn't taped a flashlight inside the case, the only cycles it would ever see from here on out are re-cyclers. It's dropped out of DNS and unjoined the internet invisible. This is an ex-host.
SYSADMIN: Well, I'd better replace it then.
PRALINE: (to camera) If you want to get anything done in this country you've got to complain till you're blue in the mouth.
SYSADMIN: Sorry guv, we're right out of blade servers.
PRALINE: I see. I see. I get the picture.
SYSADMIN: I've got a PC running Windows.
PRALINE: Does it scale?
SYSADMIN: Not really, no.
PRALINE: Well, it's scarcely a replacement, then is it?
Re:PININ' for the FJORDS?! (Score:4, Funny)
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I'm sorry, you're going to have to repeat that; what happened? Were they somehow removed from the internet?
They were the recipients of a staged compaction of fissile material achieving critical mass and subsequent chain reaction within a projectile arriving from an exospheric source.
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It's the only way to be sure.
Beowulf cluster (Score:3, Insightful)
36% of their highly redundant infrastructure was made unavailable, leaving 64% of the control servers online and fully capable of servicing the millions of bots under its control.
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knocked offline...taken offline....takedown...knock out.......have knocked it off..."De-peered,"'...pulled the plug... refusing to transmit
If they weren't pushing out the spam, they'd be pushing up the daisies!
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He sucks at reading comprehension just like you're awesome at sarcasm.
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If it wasn't sarcasm, what exactly was it?
Crappy sarcasm.
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No; the up-stream ISP was Troyak, and they did nothing. Troyak’s own up-stream provider got fed up with them and they cut the tube coming from Troyak and left it draining into the kitchen sink.
Internet Death Penalty (Score:4, Informative)
Might as well call it by its name: Internet Death Penalty [catb.org]
Cisco? (Score:2)
Tangled memes (Score:2, Insightful)
I smell my karma burning.
Re: (Score:2)
You beat me to it.....only I was going to say:
WTF is "Niney"
You turned it into a triple-combo!
Update: Troyak is back online (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Update: Troyak is back online (Score:4, Funny)
They say only sixeyate made it back online though...
Why the "statement" from Cisco? (Score:3, Insightful)
Zeus shall have his revenge! (Score:2)
When the gods are at war it is us, mere mortals who suffer because of it. Ye best beware the Ides of March [wikipedia.org] will soon be upon us!
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These guys? Ye gods! Help us!
What? no no, The God Mars isn't into that crap! Zeus is planing to fuck up Silverstein's concert this coming 15th down at the Jersey shore. You know, the post-hardcore band with that song, The Ides of March? It's track #3 on their full length studio album, Discovering the Waterfront. Mars really digs them, loves to get totally wasted, get in brutal fights and steal lose women from their punk-ass boyfriends while at their shows...
Haven't you been keeping up with all this? We're talking about the Gods for God
As will become more and more apparent... (Score:3, Insightful)
The only way to truely combat cybercrime is to just cut the connection.
When you have a country that willingly harbors criminals - just because they are attacking someone else - the problem ceases to be one of law enforcement or diplomacy. Sure, you can try to send some cops over there and see what can be accomplished. For the most part, not much.
The key is that if Russia, Bulgaria, Romania or whereever wants to have "Internet freedom" for their citizens where they can do whatever they heck they want without any consequences, the only possible response is for everyone else on the planet to just agree to pull the plug.
Now, so far it has been impossible to make this happen. Nobody has cared enough because "well, it is just some virtual land called cyberspace." For the most part, law enforcement doesn't care if people are robbed in cyberspace - it isn't really their jurisdiction. There is no global cop that can go anywhere to track down cybercriminals, and in most of the world a request to please go down and arrest someone because they committed a crime somewhere else is met with guffaws and snickers. So as long as your local law enforcement was willing to turn a blind eye to your activities, you could pretty much get away with anything.
And believe me, in most of the world today, law enforcement has a lot better things to do than deal with any sort of computer crime. So there are zero consequences. Something a lot of people have learned over the last 15 years or so. Of course a few Unix geeks knew that since 1980 or so.
Now, if this sticks and if it can be repeated - both of which are highly doubtful - we might actually get somewhere in having some real consequences for bad actions on the Internet. But I suspect this will all be put back together next week (if not sooner) and there will continue to be zero consequences. Keep this in mind, because if you annoy someone enough on the Internet there is a chance they already know there are no consequences in most of the world. Lori Drew is a case in point. They really wanted to nail her for something, anything. But the rule of cyberspace wins out in the end. The physical world has real consequences, the virtual world has only virtual consequences.
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The only way to truly combat cybercrime is to just cut the connection.
What will end up happening is that there will be several chunks of the "Net". So Nigeria can do its own thing(as an example). There's absolutely nothing to keep other countries from yanking the plug on anyone that they want as soon as it crosses their borders. "We don't like you - get lost" seems like a fairly effective way, especially for countries that lack a proper satellite infrastructure and have to rely on optical and metal/coppe
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it's like having a town meeting and one guy in the back with Tourette's keeps screaming at the top of his lungs. Sensible people politely push him out the door, lock it, and proceed with the meeting.
Sensible and caring people would muzzle him so that he could still listen and participate (via writing or sign language), you NARGIN FLARGIN WERTHERS CANDIES!
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Sensible and caring people would muzzle him so that he could still listen and participate (via writing or sign language), you NARGIN FLARGIN WERTHERS CANDIES!
Heh. But, seriously. They can't get internet, but they do have news feeds and newspapers and all of the non-digital technology at their disposal, so it IS a bit like they can effectively only listen to part of what's going on until they stop trying to ruin it for everyone else.
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The countries of the world that have the power need to flex their muscles and deny those who don't police their own traffic adequately a chance to participate.
So you suggest our great leaders should cut every country from the internet that doesn't implement the terrorist-and-child-molester-stopping three strikes law? Politicians will abuse every power that we the people give them.
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Did you just advocate the ACTA, but on a much larger scale?
Obviously not. But what exactly should we do when there is a known criminal element(remember this - it's kind of important) that is abusing and making the rest of us unsafe as well as so burdened by their activity that it actually is causing the entire Internet to nearly come to a screeching halt? Perhaps my previous example was wrong and I should have likened it to an outbreak of a disease. Of course you quarantine the area. If they won't do
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And these ISP's other customers...? (Score:4, Insightful)
There seems to be an implication that Troyak and Group 3 were somehow complicit with all this botnet activity, yet no such claims are actually being explicitly made - just that the ISPs have been "associated" with these botnets, whatever that means.
Did these ISPs have legitimate customers who have now been cut off because of the criminals alongside them on the ISP's network? Was the ISP asked to deal with the situation first, and either ignored or refused such requests? If these ISPs were fronts for the botnet owners, where's the evidence? Did someone just think, oh, there are a bunch of bad guys on this ISP; let's cut the whole thing off and fuck the rest of their customers?
This action sounds like the IT equivalent of a government blowing up an entire city block because a couple terrorists are renting an apartment there.
If these ISPs have legitimate customers, hopefully they sue the hell out of the upstream for this.
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When a botnet’s executable is contacting server xyz, and server xyz’s IP address belongs to you, damn right you will know about it, because if you don’t figure out on your own that you’re providing internet connectivity to a botnet control server, you’ll soon be notified by authorities and asked to cut the plug on the customer who’s running the server.
All it takes is some antivirus/antimalware group to reverse-engineer the code and determine that yes, in fact, it IS using
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Did these ISPs have legitimate customers who have now been cut off because of the criminals alongside them on the ISP's network?
Yes
Was the ISP asked to deal with the situation first
Yes
, and either ignored or refused such requests?
Yes
If these ISPs were fronts for the botnet owners, where's the evidence?
Probably not
Did someone just think, oh, there are a bunch of bad guys on this ISP; let's cut the whole thing off and fuck the rest of their customers?
Yes
This action sounds like the IT equivalent of a government blowing up an entire city block because a couple terrorists are renting an apartment there.
Maybe, but nobody died. A store which sells illegal drugs will be closed, even when they also sell legitimate stuff to legitimate customers. Is that excessive?
If these ISPs have legitimate customers, hopefully they sue the hell out of the upstream for this.
No, hopefully they will know better then to do business with an ISP which doesn't mind doing business with criminals. It's not like this wasn't public knowledge.
No Longer Vigilantism? (Score:2)
In the past, when this sort of thing has been suggested, the cries of "vigilante" and "lawlessness" were cried from the highest mountaintops, and the lowest swamps of the Internet. And anyone who actually DID anything was pilloried and run out of town on a rail.
[sarcasm] What changed, I wonder? [/sarcasm]
Now that the losses are in the hundreds of millions, in several dozen different currencies, those same voices seem to have lost their enthusiasm.
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The Internet Death Penalty is older than Slashdot and even older than some Slashdot users. The internet is based on huge number of peering agreements, agreements which can be made, changed and terminated. The structure of the internet changes all the time. Take a look at the BGP updates if this interests you. One of the reasons for depeering is "you're causing us too much trouble, so we don't want your business anymore." Then the shunned ISP has to find another uplink. Sometimes no other ISP wants to act as
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It isn't "vigilantism" to choose to cease doing business with someone. If these ISPs feel that there was a breach of contract they can sue.
... in the meantime... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Niney!? (Score:5, Funny)
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It comes after atey and before teny
Did you really just spell "eight" like that?
Re:Niney!? (Score:4, Funny)
I think it's after twelfty.
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Their network has been neutralized alright.
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Net neutrality only applies when you don’t know what’s going on or at least can reasonably argue this.
If you know someone is spamming, it’s a different situation.
Re:Windows again (Score:5, Insightful)
The target is a "user". Anyone that doesn't understand system administration and security that is left alone with a computer can defeat anything that the OS does. If your grandma wants to install something like WeatherBug on Linux and the software to do this exists, she will succeed. If it requires root access and she has it, she will provide it in copious amounts for the malware application. Whatever is needed will be provided. Because she knows she wants to install this, for some utterly unknown reason.
Now, if you have a computer that it is impossible for the user to install stuff on, well then you have a much more secure platform. Unfortunately, this requires an administrator for those cases where something is really needed and actually should be installed. Once the user and the administrator are the same person, you have just lost any semblance of security.
99% of the Windows machines in homes out there do not have an administrator other than the user themselves. If these were magically replaced by Linux machines with the same administrator, this wouldn't solve anything. Sure, the user would need to do sudo or su in order to really screw things up, but if the application they thought they wanted to install asked for it, they would do it.
Re:Windows again (Score:4, Informative)
Now, if you have a computer that it is impossible for the user to install stuff on, well then you have a much more secure platform.
What you have is a damn iPad
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Nobody likes to see crooks get away with being crooks but keep in mind if you are championing the forced removal of content like this, then you are also championing the removal of any content deemed objectionable by a governing body.
Please drop the strawman and move away slowly.
Botnets are NOT content.
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Botnets are NOT content.
They are after a cigarette.
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What exactly do you think was located on the control servers that they killed?
Content.
It’s not a strawman fallacy. It’s a slippery slope fallacy. Get your fallacies straight, man.
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Absolutely, at the end of the day I would rather just deal with a few more spam emails.
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Or is that, "'bot time"!
It isn't.