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Botnet wars...
It looks like the recent outbreak of near zero-day attacks on Windows 2000 systems has degenerated into a bot war between different gangs of system hijackers.
This time it isn't about who can compromise the most machines - it's, as they say, all about the benjamins. Spammers and phishers hire botnets to send their mails, while extortionists use them to run DDOS attacks. Apparently it costs only $350 to hire a network of 5,500 compromised systems...
One thought: if the price is so low because there are so many infected machines out there, then monitoring the market prices for botnets will be a good indicator of how well security systems are working. The less machines infected, the higher the price...
There's also an interesting SFnal thought here. I've been playing with the idea that fast burn singularities are inherently unstable - especially once they've built computronium Matrioshka brains around their home stars. While I've speculated that this instability is due to light speed lag leading to wars over computational resources, there's a possibility in massive (and literal!) identity theft...
This time it isn't about who can compromise the most machines - it's, as they say, all about the benjamins. Spammers and phishers hire botnets to send their mails, while extortionists use them to run DDOS attacks. Apparently it costs only $350 to hire a network of 5,500 compromised systems...
One thought: if the price is so low because there are so many infected machines out there, then monitoring the market prices for botnets will be a good indicator of how well security systems are working. The less machines infected, the higher the price...
There's also an interesting SFnal thought here. I've been playing with the idea that fast burn singularities are inherently unstable - especially once they've built computronium Matrioshka brains around their home stars. While I've speculated that this instability is due to light speed lag leading to wars over computational resources, there's a possibility in massive (and literal!) identity theft...
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Windows is the world's leading operating system (tm)
And it's crap.
Windows has had more time and effort thrown at it than Apollo and it's still so flakey that mall-rat skiddies are pimping CNN's desktops to the Elbonian mafia on a regular basis. This is the equivalent of building the pyramids from beautifully piled damp sand because the infinite reconfigurability of DesktopSandWidgets is so much more fashionable than that boring old stone and the team of freshly-whipped stoneadmins needed to keep it moving.
"computronium Matrioshka brains" ? We're going to be lucky if we still 0wn our own toasters by the end of the decade.
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Probably from drinking vast amounts of Jolt in
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I'd like to think that if an external connection claimed that it had rights over my forebrain, I'd notice :->
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