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Malware Developer Who Used Spam Botnet To Pay For College Gets No Prison Time (bleepingcomputer.com)
An anonymous reader writes:
The operator of a 77,000-strong spam botnet was sentenced to two years probation and no prison time after admitting his crime and completely reforming his life. The former botnet operator is now working for a cybersecurity company, and admitted his actions as soon as the FBI knocked on his door back in 2013. The botnet operator, a 29-year-old from Santa Clara, California, says he was tricked by fellow co-schemers who told him they were not doing anything wrong by infecting computers with malware because they were not accessing private information such as banking or financial records. Furthermore, the botnet operator escaped prison time because he used all the money he earned in getting a college degree at Cal Poly instead of using it on a lavish lifestyle or drugs. This case is similar to the one that MalwareTech (aka Marcus Hutchins) now faces in the U.S. for his role in developing the Kronos trojan, but also after turning his life around and working as a cybersecurity researcher for years. |
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| There are no conversations. |
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| Jefferson Han |
The funniest thing is that now I know what reverse spam is. You know you get spam from people saying, 'Can you invest in this or that?' People are now e-mailing me saying, 'Oh my God, can I invest in your company?' It's a reverse solicitation of money. |
| Stephen Daldry |
Actually, to be honest, this is a useful time to not be knowing what I'll be doing in 2013 or 2014, because really, for the last however many years, I've known what I've been doing for years and years ahead. You get into a cycle of non-reflection, and that gets a bit scary. |
| Bobby Ray Inman |
Another factor is the decision, made in 1976, to sharply divide the FBI and the foreign intelligence agencies. The FBI would collect within the United States; the foreign intelligence agencies would collect overseas. |
| Frank Abagnale |
My proudest moment was probably when my oldest boy finished law school and went on to become an FBI agent. It was just beyond my imagination that - with my background - my own son would become an FBI agent. |
| Jim Garrison |
The head of the CIA, it seems to me, would think long and hard before he admitted that former employees of his had been involved in the murder of the President of the United States-even if they weren't acting on behalf of the Agency when they did it. |
| Martin Jacques |
Following the end of the Cold War, there was much discussion concerning the point of NATO. In the event, it was reinvented as a means of reducing Russia's reach on its western frontiers and seeking to isolate it. Its former East European client states were admitted to NATO, as were the Baltic states. |
| Aravind Adiga |
When I was growing up in the south Indian city of Madras, there were only two political parties that mattered; one was run by a former matinee idol, and the other was run by his former screenwriter. |
| Tennessee Williams |
We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life. |
| Rabindranath Tagore |
I have become my own version of an optimist. If I can't make it through one door, I'll go through another door - or I'll make a door. Something terrific will come no matter how dark the present. |
| Charlie Daniels |
Well, I just can't play the game anymore. I'm 63 years old, and I've been in the business for 40 years now. I take good advice and direction really well, but I don't need somebody that finished college two years ago to come in and tell me what I should be recording. |
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Advanced Hybrid Peer to Peer Botnet. The botnet requires no bootstrap procedure.
The botnet communicates via the peer list contained in each bot. However, unlike Slapper [8], each bot has a fixed and limited size peer list and does not reveal its peer list to other bots. In this way, when a bot is captured by defenders, only the limited number of bots in its peer list are exposed.
A botmaster could easily monitor the entire botnet by issuing a report command. This command instructs all (or partial) bots to report to a specific compromised machine (which is called a sensor host) that is cont...
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Malicious Chrome Extensions Infect Over 100,000 Users Again
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/05/malicious-chrome-extensions-infect-more-than-100000-users-again/
Criminals infected more than 100,000 computers with browser extensions that stole login credentials, surreptitiously mined cryptocurrencies, and engaged in click fraud. The malicious extensions were hosted in Google's official Chrome Web Store. The scam was active since at least March with seven malicious extensions known so far, researchers with security firm Radware reported Thursday. Google's security team remo...
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Hacked Water Heaters Could Trigger Mass Blackouts Someday
At the Usenix Security conference this week, a group of Princeton University security researchers will present a study that considers a little-examined question in power grid cybersecurity: What if hackers attacked not the supply side of the power grid, but the demand side? From a report:
In a series of simulations, the researchers imagined what might happen if hackers controlled a botnet composed of thousands of silently hacked consumer internet of things devices, particularly power-hungry ones like air conditioners, water heaters, and space heaters. Then they ran a series of software simulations to see how many of those devices a...
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WikiLeaks Dump Reveals CIA Malware For Tracking Windows Devices Via WiFi Networks
WikiLeaks has published the documentation manual for an alleged CIA tool that can track users of Wi-Fi-capable Windows devices based on the Extended Service Set (ESS) data of nearby Wi-Fi networks. According to the tool's 42-page manual, the tool's name is ELSA. Bleeping Computer has an image embedded in its report that explains how the tool works. There are six steps that summarize the ELSA operation. Bleeping Computer reports:
Step 1: CIA operative configures ELSA implant (malware) based on a target's environment. This is done using a tool called the "PATCHER wizard," which generates the ELSA payload, a si...
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Gmail is Now Blocking 100 Million Extra Spam Messages Every Day With AI
Google has recruited its in-house machine learning framework, TensorFlow, to help train additional spam filters for Gmail users. With the new filters in place as of last month, the company claims Gmail is now blocking an extra 100 million spam messages every day. From a report:
In the context of Gmail's 1 billion-plus users, this isn't necessarily a huge gain -- it works out as one extra blocked spam email per 10 users -- but Google says Gmail already blocks 99.99 percent of spam, so working out what constitutes that last sliver of a percentage is hard.
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Guy Robs Someone At Gunpoint For Domain Name, Gets 20 Years In Jail
Yesterday, 43-year-old Iowa man Sherman Hopkins Jr. was sentenced to 20 years in prison for attempting to rob a domain name from another man at gunpoint in 2017. As Motherboard reports, "this may be the first time someone has attempted to steal a domain name at gunpoint." From the report:
Last June, Hopkins broke into the home of 26 year-old Ethan Deyo in Cedar Rapids, Iowa one afternoon and demanded that Deyo to log on to his computer to transfer the domain name for "doitforstate.com" to another account. According to Deyo's bio on his personal website, he is a web entrepreneur who previously worked for the web hosting se...
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Unfortunately, I think the rise of chatbots or conversational agents is actually blurring the definition of spam. If a recruiter emails a bunch of people with generated personalized messages, is it spam or not? I certainly don't want to see it and the generated parts often sound super fake and wrong, so it seems even more like spam.
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39 Years Ago The World's First Spam Was Sent (Praise Him)
Wednesday was the 39th anniversary of the world's first spam, sent by Gary Thuerk, a marketer for Massachusetts' Digital Equipment Corporation in 1978 to over 300 users on Arpanet. It was written in all capital letters, and its body began with 273 more email addresses that wouldn't fit in the header. The DEC marketer "was reportedly trying to flag the attention of the burgeoning California tech community," reports the San Jose Mercury News. The message touted two demonstrations of the DECSYSTEM-20, a PDP-10 mainframe computer.
An of...
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"YouTube Star Who Gave Man Toothpaste-Filled Oreos Sentenced To Prison"
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Thinklynx: All the time wasting potential and half the spam.
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