__/ [GreyCloud] on Saturday 11 February 2006 17:38 \__
> http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002798414_botnet11m.html
>
> "It turns out the Seattle hospital's computers ? along with up to 50,000
> others across the country ? had been turned into an army of robots
> controlled by 20-year-old Christopher Maxwell of Vacaville, Calif.,
> according to a federal indictment issued Thursday. And Maxwell, along
> with two juveniles, earned about $100,000 in the process, court
> documents state.
>
> The trio had created a "botnet," a phenomenon that is on the cutting
> edge of computer crime, federal officials say."
>
> Now what was that about properly administering windows??
>
> It looks like it can't be done.
Flaws which enable a malicious prick to hijack windows boxes are discovered
every other week, /before/ they are even patched. As almost any
computerwhich is assigned an IP address runs Windows (with the exception of
non-desk/laptop devices and excluding non-active IP's), one technique can
rule them all. Machine capturing is then just a matter of bandwidth.
Many juveniles have been forming such botnets recently. You see it in the
news quite regularly. I can recall numbers as high as 150,000 computers.
What the hijacker uses these bots for is some 'fun' which is left for the
capturer to ponder. My site /still/ gets attacked approximately 1,500 times
a day. Each Windows zombie attempts to trigger many handreds of SQL
operations simultaneously. Luckily I can detect and forward all zombies to:
http://microsoft.com/this-is-a-windows-zombie-one-among-1000s-that-attack-my-site-every-day
Honestly, I do. Try going to, e.g.:
http://schestowitz.com/weblog/archives/category/internet
The message to Microsoft, which ought to percolate using ~50,000 404's every
month, does not get through. This has gone on without interruptions since
September last year. I still wait for Microsoft to get their s**t together,
but they only ever appear to extract the urine (read: take the piss). So,
how am I supposed not to loathe Windows? How can I tolerate it? This
bitterness is probably what led me to this newsgroup, among other factors.
Roy
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