Midnight Marauder
Rookie
- Feb 28, 2009
- 12,404
- 1,939
- 0
- Banned
- #1
I've been waging a war online for several years against botnet operators and their cowardly activities. They think they can't be traced down, think they're smarter than the law and everyone else, and never believe for one second they will be caught.
Some background for anyone uninformed: These botnet operators launch little programs that infect computers all over the world which have very little browser/registry security -- most often running IE6, which should be banned -- turning these computers into zombies and then controlling them, directing them from a remote location, to repeatedly request page loads or files from the target website. Completely unknown to the owners of these computers. (DDoS = Distributed Denial of Service attack.)
This can and sometimes does bring a website "down," denying service to visitors. It's mostly just an annoyance -- it's really not all that hard to block this shit -- but for some sites it can be a real pain in the ass, as twitter recently found out and was completely unprepared for.
Anyhow this guy in this story was caught. My tiny contribution was the vast database of known zombie computers and the controlling units I have collected over the years. But the BIG break was of course, the botnet operator's own mouth. Read and enjoy:
TimesOnline.com: *Local man indicted on federal cyber attack charges
The problem is, even after these pukes are caught their botnet continues to operate, causing headaches for the target sites for possibly years to come. And it's really the most rudimentary script kiddie shit, takes no special knowledge or skills to do.
To combat this, for awhile I took a really aggressive approach -- I installed a script on all of my sites that automatically loads the latest version of firefox on the IE6 zombie computers, and makes it the default browser. But.... That approach wasn't very nice, wasn't very user-friendly, so I took it out.
Collecting their data however, is an ongoing, daily deal. When a IE6 or AOL browser hits my sites, it gets nothing but a 404 error page, but all data on that computer is collected and archived.
Microsoft should RECALL IE6 and get it removed from the online world.
Some background for anyone uninformed: These botnet operators launch little programs that infect computers all over the world which have very little browser/registry security -- most often running IE6, which should be banned -- turning these computers into zombies and then controlling them, directing them from a remote location, to repeatedly request page loads or files from the target website. Completely unknown to the owners of these computers. (DDoS = Distributed Denial of Service attack.)
This can and sometimes does bring a website "down," denying service to visitors. It's mostly just an annoyance -- it's really not all that hard to block this shit -- but for some sites it can be a real pain in the ass, as twitter recently found out and was completely unprepared for.
Anyhow this guy in this story was caught. My tiny contribution was the vast database of known zombie computers and the controlling units I have collected over the years. But the BIG break was of course, the botnet operator's own mouth. Read and enjoy:
TimesOnline.com: *Local man indicted on federal cyber attack charges
The problem is, even after these pukes are caught their botnet continues to operate, causing headaches for the target sites for possibly years to come. And it's really the most rudimentary script kiddie shit, takes no special knowledge or skills to do.
To combat this, for awhile I took a really aggressive approach -- I installed a script on all of my sites that automatically loads the latest version of firefox on the IE6 zombie computers, and makes it the default browser. But.... That approach wasn't very nice, wasn't very user-friendly, so I took it out.
Collecting their data however, is an ongoing, daily deal. When a IE6 or AOL browser hits my sites, it gets nothing but a 404 error page, but all data on that computer is collected and archived.
Microsoft should RECALL IE6 and get it removed from the online world.
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