Fatal System Error 104
brothke writes "As computing and technology has evolved, so too have the security threats correspondingly evolved. The classic Yankee Doodle virus of 1989 did minimal damage, all while playing a patriotic, albeit monotone song. In 2010, aggressive malware now executes in stealth mode, running in the background with an oblivious end-user, and antivirus software that can’t detect it." Read on for the rest of Ben's review.
Cybercrimes have evolved using increasingly sophisticated techniques, and the resulting financial losses are staggering. Many criminal cyber gangs are well organized and resourceful and their ability to recover after new defenses have been deployed make it a challenge for those on the right side of the law.
| Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who are Bringing Down the Internet | |
| author | Joseph Menn |
| pages | 304 |
| publisher | PublicAffairs |
| rating | 8/10 |
| reviewer | Ben Rothke |
| ISBN | 978-1586487485 |
| summary | Non-fiction cyber-thriller with super analytical advice |
Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who are Bringing Down the Internet is an excellent book billed as a non-fiction cyber-thriller, and describes the cyber gangs who operate on the Internet. Author Joseph Menn, a cyber security reporter for the Financial Times, takes the reader into the inner operations of today's cyber-criminal, who use the Internet as their personal mint.
While Willie Sutton never really said that the reason he robbed banks is because that's where the money is; the truth is that today's cyber criminal does know where the money is, and its address is the Internet. They use the net as a means to steal and extort money from businesses and individuals.
The book's protagonist is Barrett Lyon, a highly skilled technical engineer and entrepreneur, who founded companies such as Prolexic, BitGravity and 3Crowd. It was at Prolexic where Lyon developed the software used to fend off the DoS attacks that were bringing some of his client's networks to a standstill.
Lyon, along with the other major character in the book, Andy Crocker, a British policeman, were the 1-2 punch that resulted in the prosecution of a Russian cyber criminal. The fact that the prosecution took place via the Russian judicial system was a surprise to everyone. What was unusual about the prosecution is that criminals in Russia and Eastern Europe often operate with the assistance of corrupt political and police forces. Even though the evidence against the defendant was significant, the ability to secure a guilty verdict was far from a sure thing.
Much of the book deals with Lyon and his working relationship with BetCRIS, a company offering online gambling services, including sports betting, online casino games, online bingo and mobile gambling.
BetCRIS is an off-shore company, operating in the safe havens of the Republic of Costa Rica. In 2003, at the height of the DoS attacks, the BetCRIS website was down for nearly a month. With tens of millions of dollars of gambling revenue at stake, BetCRIS management were desperate for a solution, and they reached out to Lyon.
While Lyon created a first-generation solution to stop the early DoS attacks, the book details how the attackers were able to get around those countermeasures, and how it turned into a cat and mouse game of futility, where Lyon would create a fix, only to be beguiled by a new attack.
In the book, Menn writes about many of the major players in the Internet criminal world. He spends a good amount of time writing about the infamous Russian Business Network (RBN). He notes that little true business was carried out via the RBN; rather it was a front for Internet-based criminal activities in Russia.
Menn does get into some technical details, but not so much so to confuse a non-technical reader. He covers topics such as botnets, DoS and DDoS attacks, cyberwarfare, cyber espionage, and the difficulty in prosecuting the perpetrators.
Menn notes that there are many reasons why Russia and in Eastern Europe are ground zero for cybercriminals. The educational institutions there provide a good source of technical training; combined that with the fact that legitimate job opportunities are often quite limited. Add to the fact that political and law enforcement officials often ignore the cyber attacks again the rich capitalists of the US, the difficulty and challenges with jurisdiction, and you have a perfect storm for the creation of a sophisticated cyber criminal element. Finally, there is a long and established culture of corruption in Russia and in Eastern Europe that adds to the problem.
There are two directions that Fatal System Error takes. The main part of the book is Menn's narrative, which takes up 11 of the book's 12 chapters. These 11 chapters take the reader on an enthralling ride into the inner workings of the cyber-criminal world. Fatal System Error is an enjoyable read on par books such as The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage and Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of Kevin Mitnick.
Where the book truly stands out is in the final chapter Fixing What's Fixable, and is worth purchasing for that chapter alone. Menn displays his incredibly deep understanding of the underlying issues around computer security and why we are vulnerable. He suggests numerous pragmatic solutions to the crisis, and how to better secure the Internet and networks.
Some of the ideas include significantly greater budgets for information security, more liability against software developers who write insecure code, greater information sharing between the cybercrime agencies in the US and their counterparts in Russia, and more. His on-target analysis of what the US Government can and should do to increase the security of the Internet infrastructure is quite impressive.
Reading the narrative part of the book, many readers will likely be scared to death to connect their computers to the Internet, and to a limited degree, rightfully so. Even with Menn's balanced and compelling account of what transpired, the threat of identity theft and ease of how financial accounts are breached may be too much for some readers many to bear.
If corporate America and the US Government would take Menn's suggestions to heart on how to create a secure Internet infrastructure, many of those security concerns he wrote about could be obviated, and the cyber criminals of Eastern Europe would have to look for different work.
Additional pragmatic ideas that Menn suggests are to legalize and regulate online gambling, more funding to teach safer computing in schools, and for a complete re-engineering of the Internet, in order to build in the necessary security functionality which should have been in there in the first place. As part of the process to re-engineer the Internet, Menn suggests designs that create accountability into the Internet fabric.
Finally, Menn notes that many end-users are not blameless. By not educating themselves on how to securely use the Internet, they are setting themselves up to becoming victims. He writes that anyone that connects a computer to the Internet needs to have significant security vigilance to ensure that they don't make themselves a victim. It is 2010 and far too many people are still oblivious to the security threats. Many still naively believe that someone from Nigeria really does want to make them richer with tens of millions of dollars worth of gold from their deceased uncle.
Menn shows how the underlying infrastructure of the Internet is significantly more vulnerable than most people realize. Finally, what exacerbates the problem is that those doing the attacks are working much quicker than those who are trying to secure it.
One of Menn's criticisms is that the US Government spends a fraction of what it should on securing its critical technology infrastructure. Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who are Bringing Down the Internet is the wake-up call that those in Washington, and those charged with IT need to wake up to. Unfortunately, it is likely those that truly need to read this book, will press the information security snooze button yet again.
Ben Rothke is the author of Computer Security: 20 Things Every Employee Should Know.
You can purchase Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who are Bringing Down the Internet from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Thus it has been, thus it will always be. (Score:1)
"Finally, what exacerbates the problem is that those doing the attacks are working much quicker than those who are trying to secure it."
More $ to be made in attacking than defending.
Uh, no (Score:5, Insightful)
Great, so they want to redesign the Internet because people don't want to learn how to identify a phishing site and can't understand that giving your account numbers to unverifiable strangers is a bad idea? No thanks. A fool and his money are soon parted and there's not much you're going to change about that. Also, I'm sure that "accountability" is a euphamism for "tracked everywhere you go even more than you are now". Seems to me they are trying to increase protection against petty criminals while drastically reducing protection against overzealous governments that want to censor.
Re:Uh, no (Score:4, Insightful)
Great, so they want to redesign the Internet because people don't want to learn how to identify a phishing site and can't understand that giving your account numbers to unverifiable strangers is a bad idea?
Oh please, I think Sony put an end to the delusion that only grandmas and morons are susceptible to phishing or malware. Allow me to give you an example which most people here won't be able to do detect instantaneously: zero-day exploit in Flash + rootkit + trojan. I run a tight ship like the next nerd, but my AV software still flags trojans that somehow make it onto my system from time to time, and those are only the ones that it CAN detect.
And yes, there are zealots who will undoubtedly say things like "Flash is for suckers" or "what do you expect with Windows?", but these people should consider the fact that (a) not everyone lives in caves, and (b) some people just have more important things to worry about, like losing their homes.
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Don't be ridiculous. That's just ignorant.
Ubuntu users have found nasty viruses coming from screen savers in the OFFICIAL repository. Pretending that unix/linux solutions are inherently safe is about the same as sticking your head in the sand. The only reason they're safer is because people aren't that interested in exploiting the relatively few people who use them.
Like it or not, Windows is the premier operating system in the world, for personal computers. The average user is never going to be a linux nerd
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Re:Uh, no (Score:4, Informative)
I believe the Ubuntu screensaver issue was from the Gnome-Look.org site, not the official repositories. My apologies if you're referring to different virus I have no knowledge of. That said, you are correct, unix and linux are not remotely immune.
The difference is that *nix systems in their various incarnations have had decades of exposure to all sorts of attacks and have evolved accordingly. I would not call them immune, I would call them resistant. There are many good tools available to secure them and, unlike Windows, these tend to be considered standard system utilities not third-party add-ons.
I believe the whole "anti-virus, anti-malware" mentality of removing an infection after a compromise has taken place is fundamentally broken as a security measure. That's because it is not security at all; it is damage control. After your security has failed it might be useful for containment but that's about it. The correct way to respond to a system compromise is to format the drives and reinstall the OS from known good media. Real security systems are designed to prevent compromises, not to remove malware after a compromise has happened and malware has been installed. This is what you find on *nix. It's not just systems and tools, it's a mentality that goes with them.
This is why there tend not to be successful viruses (I use the term loosely to also include worms and such) propagating in the wild on *nix systems. There do exist viruses for *nix systems; they're called proofs-of-concept. Like all self-replicating forms of malware, they have something in common: they must compromise the system (either a user account or root) before they can do anything else. That is what *nix systems are good at preventing. It also helps tremendously that *nix systems tend not to be the "write once, compromise millions of machines" monoculture that you find on Windows.
The last thing I'll say is that average *nix users tend to be more competent and more knowledgable than average Windows users. They're more likely to know a risk when they take one. They're more likely to understand why Flash and other software with a terrible security track record is not trustworthy and should be treated as such. They tend to have habits that reduce their exposure. Overall, they are harder targets and don't represent the low-hanging fruit. None of this amounts to "perfect immunity" of course, but represents a hell of an improvement over the average.
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The CERT Advistory [cert.org] history shows us that when the majority of systems on the internet were *nix, there were lots of exploits for *nix systems... ...and that over time, as more and more home users started populating the net with Windows system, the exploits for Windows grew in number... ...and towards the end of the history, when Windows systems vastly outnumbered everything else on the internet, the great majority of exploits were for Windows systems.
Every time there is a discussion like this, somebody pipes up with what you just said as though it were novel, as though he were mentioning something new that wasn't already well-known (but apparently not well-understood).
You are talking decades ago if you refer to a time when the Internet was mostly Unix systems. That Unix throughout the decades has had many attacks and the security issues that go with them, and has had this amount of time to evolve ways of dealing with them was precisely my point. Re
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Pretending that unix/linux solutions are inherently safe is about the same as sticking your head in the sand. The only reason they're safer is because people aren't that interested in exploiting the relatively few people who use them.
Inherently safe? Yeah, you're probably right. Even the best, most secure OS in the world can't protect a truly motivated idiot from himself. Inherently safer , however, is what I would claim for Linux, based upon my own anecdotal experience. It's harder to hose an entire Linux box than an entire Windows box and easier to clean up after the fact (having had to clean up both OS'...YMMV). I knew a Linux admin (and I use the term very loosely) who constantly had his boxes hacked on a regular basis. As a
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Ubuntu only *appears* safe. It has fewer viruses because it's not popular enough to attract virus writers. If Ubuntu ever became a common desktop OS, you'd see common Linux viruses. The issues are ecological, not technical.
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Don't say you have a tight setup when you run Windows, it's impossible.
Don't say you have a tight setup when that's your attitude. It's impossible.
Re:Uh, no (Score:5, Insightful)
Great, so they want to redesign the Internet because people don't want to learn how to identify a phishing site and can't understand that giving your account numbers to unverifiable strangers is a bad idea?
Oh please, I think Sony put an end to the delusion that only grandmas and morons are susceptible to phishing or malware. Allow me to give you an example which most people here won't be able to do detect instantaneously: zero-day exploit in Flash + rootkit + trojan. I run a tight ship like the next nerd, but my AV software still flags trojans that somehow make it onto my system from time to time, and those are only the ones that it CAN detect.
And yes, there are zealots who will undoubtedly say things like "Flash is for suckers" or "what do you expect with Windows?", but these people should consider the fact that (a) not everyone lives in caves, and (b) some people just have more important things to worry about, like losing their homes.
Flash is known insecure software with a terrible track record, and I treat it as such. I obviously can't make others do the same but they're crazy not to. It undoubtedly helps that I am not using Windows (just why that helps is a separate debate). That to me is basic common sense combined with a few minutes of Googling. If that's the standard now for "living in a cave" then the standards these days are quite low. For your item "b" there, it's a lot easier to keep your home when some criminal hasn't drained your bank accounts for you.
It's not about Flash, Windows, living in caves, or having other concerns in life. No, those are all distractions from the actual issue, and you can tell because they're always said in the same irritated emotional tone. It's about two different mentalities. They come up in lots of otherwise unrelated issues including those that are much more political in nature. One mentality wants to look after its own interests and equip itself in order to protect itself. The other believes that is too much of a bother, not their problem, or otherwise is someone else's job. I do not exaggerate in the least when I say that big government of the "we know what's good for you" variety derives most of its existence from the latter because these people want someone to take care of them, almost like children.
So I secure my systems after teaching myself how to do so, and I study good practices. Another person thinks this is too much of a bother and goes with whatever vendor defaults his system came with because to him, security is that vendor's problem only. Guess who gets compromised? Which do you suppose is an easier target? It's not about time or any of those other excuses because you always have time for something you consider important. "I don't have time" is a cute way of saying "this is not a priority". It's about personal responsibility and whether you realize that no one wants to protect your interests quite as much as you do, that all the tools and information you need are out there. Do I have time to be personally responsible and take only the amount of risk I want to take instead of being helplessly dependent on someone else to protect me? Yes, I do have time for that, no caves required.
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Swing and a miss. That's not the point at all.
That's a typical form of response when someone realizes that you made a solid point that they cannot easily dispute, yet they emotionally don't like the point you have made because it raises questions about their own behavior that they consider uncomfortable. It's basic rationalization of an urge to "shoot the messenger" or in this case, "discredit the messenger". People who do this don't seem to realize how transparent it really is.
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Computer systems were the subject of discussion. Everything *I* said about the worthiness of taking the effort to properly secure them was in the context of computers. Within that (obvious) context, what I said was plainly true.
That same post is the one where I said that
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I don't build my own cars. I don't have the tech, time, and general wherewithal to do so, especially to modern North American standards.
What I _DO_ do however, is learn how to use the features of the car and know how to drive it defensively, as opposed to thinking I should be able to snooze at the wheel.
That's the point the GP was making, making the whooshing sound
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We don't live in a perfect world. Unfortunately there are legacy softwares that the accompanying control hardware is difficult to be upgraded espeically if it is running at all times and it takes si
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Oh please, I think Sony put an end to the delusion that only grandmas and morons are susceptible to phishing or malware
You mean the people who had autorun enabled, allowing this to happen?
Allow me to give you an example which most people here won't be able to do detect instantaneously: zero-day exploit in Flash + rootkit + trojan.
Unless, of course, you disable flash by default and only enabled it for sites you can reasonably trust. While this isn't going to be 100% bulletproof, for most people it would stop this as a vector.
but my AV software still flags trojans that somehow make it onto my system from time to time, and those are only the ones that it CAN detect.
THen you're doing it wrong.
Since the computer is just an appliance to most people (and it is), I used to think that people weren't really wrong in not wanting to think about such common sense steps as would let them prevent harm to themselve
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The days when you had to actively do somehting silly, like run an executable, to have malware show up are long gone. Oh, sure, it's possible to disable enough of the functionality of a home computer that you can browse the web safely, but there's not a lot left once you've done so. Yes, this is /. and some people enjoy using Linx, but it's gotten to the point where you can't safely have a PDF viewer.
The only way to browse safely these days is to create a VM just for that purpose, and roll it back when you'
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1. Install your PDF viewer of choice, but disable the web browser integration so that it can never open a PDF without your knowledge.
2. Keep Flash installed, but use a plugin to disable it unless you want to turn it on. Same for Java and Silverlight. The only thing that's a bit silly about this is that it really shouldn't require a plugin.
3. All the usual - don't install things unless you know they're from trusted indi
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That's a complicted list to follow, even for a geek, and it has this big downside: I want to see PDFs in my broswer, and flash, and javascript, and etc. Your asking me to do a lot of work in order to be penalized.
Proper sandboxing is a much better answer - you still have to worry about jailbreaks, but that's all you have to worry about, unless you really are stupid enough to run random executables. Fortunately, app sandboxing through virtualization is here already, it just needs to mature a bit (whether i
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"Great, so they want to redesign the Internet because people don't want to learn how to identify a phishing site and can't understand that giving your account numbers to unverifiable strangers is a bad idea?"
Uh, no. With MITM attacks, spoofing raised to a fine art, SSL hijacks of any number of diffeent methods, fake/spoofed/stolen certificates, it can be very, very hard to avoid making a mistake and trusting something you should not.
"No thanks. A fool and his money are soon parted and there's not much you'
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I agree that there are sophisticated methods by which a determined adversary concentrating his efforts against a particular target might effect a compromise. However, if all compromises were of this type only, then ID theft would be a nearly unknown crime and botnets unheard-of.
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I managed a very small ISP for a while on the 90s, and have my own mail and web servers to this day.
The definition of 'lowest-hanging fruit' for all the attackers out there is much broader than you implied. If you have a host accessible via the Internet, you ARE a target. You are being attacked now, this very minute. That you deflect those attacks ahead of the host at firewall, router, or application level doesn't change that. It just makes your logs bigger or smaller.
Your operating system choice makes no
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I managed a very small ISP for a while on the 90s, and have my own mail and web servers to this day.
The definition of 'lowest-hanging fruit' for all the attackers out there is much broader than you implied. If you have a host accessible via the Internet, you ARE a target. You are being attacked now, this very minute. That you deflect those attacks ahead of the host at firewall, router, or application level doesn't change that. It just makes your logs bigger or smaller.
Your operating system choice makes no difference. They attack everything. You just use different tools and methods depending on what's available and what works.
I know what you mean. I run a very small-scale personal-use SFTP server (no shell access for any account) so I can access some of my files remotely. I use SSHGuard to hinder brute-force attacks and LogSentry to keep abreast of the activity. I constantly receive attacks at all hours of the day. They're quite dumb and have little or no sophistication; most are just trying to guess default passwords for system accounts and such.
I have told many people the same thing you just said. I have explained that
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"I have explained that if you run any sort of Internet-facing network service, you will get attacked and probably with high frequency."
Actually, you might want to be more accurate. They -ARE- being attacked, whether they know it or not. Not knowing it leads easily to not knowing they ahve been compromised. They -ARE- being attacked. Not 'will'.
"When you build everything from source, you can implement protections against buffer overflows and other vulnerabilities that aren't available on a closed-source
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I personally intrepret that a different way. To me, it means "another person taught
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Well, there are systems obscure enough to remain secure, but certainly not any flavor of Linux or BSD. That guy who wrote the Commodore 64-based web server? He's probably OK, as are people who've written an OS that's substantively their own (this used to be pretty common for old mainframes running some varient of DOS/VSE, but most of that hardware is dead now).
I wonder about Netware. I know that some Three Letter Agencies used to make good use of Netware, which seemed smart to me as all the people who kn
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Redesigning the internet so it can be controlled by a powerful few would be much more prone to abuse than the current internet.
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Great, so they want to redesign the Internet because people don't want to learn how to identify a phishing site and can't understand that giving your account numbers to unverifiable strangers is a bad idea? ... Seems to me they are trying to increase protection against petty criminals while drastically reducing protection against overzealous governments that want to censor.
You have a very narrow view of what is and isn't a vulnerablility on the internet.
We're not just talking phishing sites and nigerian scammers. Man-in-the-middle attacks, fake certs, Pakistan accidentally nuking YouTube with faulty BGP routing info, etc etc etc. The status quo is almost entirely trust based and in the long run, cannot stand.
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Great, so they want to redesign the Internet because people don't want to learn how to identify a phishing site and can't understand that giving your account numbers to unverifiable strangers is a bad idea? ... Seems to me they are trying to increase protection against petty criminals while drastically reducing protection against overzealous governments that want to censor.
You have a very narrow view of what is and isn't a vulnerablility on the internet.
We're not just talking phishing sites and nigerian scammers. Man-in-the-middle attacks, fake certs, Pakistan accidentally nuking YouTube with faulty BGP routing info, etc etc etc. The status quo is almost entirely trust based and in the long run, cannot stand.
The nice thing about trust-based situations is that you can choose to regard them as untrustworthy and proceed accordingly. It's a rare day indeed that I hear of a compromise where someone chose to do this.
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of course, we have exactly what he's asking for - it's called IPv6 - built in unique ID, built in security (IPsec), and nobody would ever want to use NAT (at least that's what a KAME developer told me, lol).
Of course, if you're a little paranoid, you'd realize marketing and governments know exactly who uses every box. Not something I like to think about...
Yankee Doodle is not monotonic. (Score:2, Informative)
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The tune is monotonous, the rendition was monophonic. Not sure which the OP meant.
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If you say it 3 times in a row while looking in a mirror you will die!!
Pedantic, but... (Score:2, Informative)
monophonic != monotone
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I never heard the original Yankee Doodle virus, but the quality of computer sound used to be quite bad, and "Yankee Doodle" played without pitch changes would still be recognizable from the rhythm.
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but the quality of computer sound used to be quite bad, and "Yankee Doodle" played without pitch changes would still be recognizable from the rhythm.
If they actually meant monotone... but it's difficult to believe that in 1989, the computer-generated sound was actually monotonic.
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Yep, i.e., a single note at a time, no multi-note harmonies.
All you pedants go dig deeper with harmonic frequencies and more acoustics signal processing for your own amusement if you like.
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"Multi-note harmonies" = polyphony.
It's not a pedantic. It's the meaning of the word. Flat. Unvarying. Never changes. an unchanging intonation according to Google.
I am pretty sure this would be similar to me saying that Linux == Ubuntu. Most people would not particularly like that here ;)
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Reviewer confused about Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
Somehow it appears the book reviewer confused Slashdot for the Ladies Home Journal. Was it really necessary to use the "cyber" prefix 47 times? Really? Because we're so impressed when it's a cybergang, instead of just a gang.
One hopes the book isn't that bad...
Frank cyber-walked his cyber-beat. (Score:5, Funny)
He knew there was a cyber-gang out there waiting to commit their next cyber-crime. Frank knew he had to catch them with the cyber-goods. Frank's 45 wouldn't be much help on this cyber-collar. Frank needed something better. Frank needed a cyber-45. Frank knew only one person who could supply him with that, Cyber-Jimmy. The best cyber-fence in the cyber-world. Frank pulled up to the next cyber-phone to give Cyber-Jimmy a cyber-call.
The cyber-phone cyber rang.
Cyber-Smurf here, came the reply.
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I'm riveted! How does it end!
Fear and loathing in PC Town (Score:3, Insightful)
Hidden code...oooo....Stealth Mode executing..aahhhhh...Root kits ! *GAG*
I know we're talking about the common user here....
But drive a car with no regards and you get the same thing...an accident.
Get a mechanic, a good one that can show you the pratfalls and some fixes.
But if you drive like a fool and visit "those" sites you get what you get.
Get Acronis a re-image your ass every week....you'll be fine.
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I hate to say it because it will make me sound one-sided, but Microsoft's control on the market is a huge detriment to security. The major computer manufacturers still don't prelo
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Not going to "those" sites is not enough anymore. An employee of ours recently got a virus from a pdf exploit from the website for the Professional photographer for a family wedding. Her website got hacked, and without realizing it she was infecting all the customers she sent links to review their photos so they could order copies. I confirmed it myself with a VM. It blew right through a fully updated AV, and reader plug-in was only about 30 days out of date. Telling users not to go to the "bad" places
Missing something? (Score:5, Informative)
"As computing and technology has evolved, so too have the security threats correspondingly evolved. The classic Yankee Doodle virus of 1989 did minimal damage, all while playing a patriotic, albeit monotone song. In 2010, aggressive malware now executes in stealth mode, running in the background with an oblivious end-user, and antivirus software that can’t detect it."
Yeah, the 1989 Yankee Doodle virus was pretty harmless.
You need to go all the way back to 1988 to find a worm which effectively shut down the Internet.
How one can overlook the Morris Worm in this context is completely beyond me.
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The Morris worm affected Unix.
Unix is completely safe.
Therefore, the Morris worm never happened.
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Exactly. Even if you look at just viruses for Microsoft platforms, Dark Avenger came out in 1989, spread wildly and destroyed user data without caution.
the first rule of cyberwarfare (Score:1)
#1 - The first rule of cyberwarfare is, you do not talk about Microsoft.
#2 - The second rule of cyberwarfare is, you DO NOT talk about Microsoft.
He calls for the end of OSS (Score:4, Interesting)
more liability against software developers who write insecure code
So now we have to buy expensive insurance before we write OSS code? What about the liability of students?
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more liability against software developers who write insecure code
So now we have to buy expensive insurance before we write OSS code? What about the liability of students?
If done sensibly, you'd have to buy insurance if you sell software. If you take money for it, you should also take responsibility for it.
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Nuff said.
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dude, this is /.
they hate, they judge, and never read the books :)
seriously...look at all fo the comments for this and others books.
the people who comment obsess on tiny little things (for this review, the word 'cyber'),
but they never discuss the merits of the book.
i feel your pain.
shutting it down (Score:2)
Who needs malware when we have McAfee anti-virus signature file updates?
Flying Under the Radar (Score:3, Interesting)
malware now executes in stealth mode, running in the background with an oblivious end-user
I've long need puzzled by malware that doesn't do this. Many trojans I've cleaned from people's computers download other pieces of malware. I once gave a demonstration of "drive-by" infection where merely viewing a malicious web page on an unpatched system resulted in nearly 20 new processes being spawned in the background. Impressive, in a way, but exceedingly obvious. Even clueless users can't help but notice that something is wrong, and IT gets called in to clean it.
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They're all favorable. Fucking Slashvertisements.
Maybe they can suck or straddle Yankee's Doodle.
What you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone on this site is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
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What you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard.
Really? For me it was from the summary when the term 'stealth mode' was used to describe your basic root kit.
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Yeah, you just wait till I break out of stealth mode and lock my s-foils into attack position. You won't be able to send an outgoing HTTP request because your nic card will be overloaded with the spam I'm forcing through your POP setup for Outlook express! Then I'll go into defensive mode and make it so you can't open task manager and stop safe mode from booting properly - thus making it a real hassle to get rid of me.
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Erm, break out of stealth and lock your s-foils?
None of the stealth-capable craft in canon have s-foils...
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I have one. (now)
I just didn't back when I was in to Star Wars.
Unlike some people, my memory span is greater than a few hours long :P
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They're all favorable. Fucking Slashvertisements.
Maybe they can suck or straddle Yankee's Doodle.
What you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone on this site is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
lol.... Billy Madison ref FTW
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.amazon.com/Fatal-System-Error-Bringing-Internet/product-reviews/1586487485/ref=cm_cr_dp_all_helpful?ie=UTF8&coliid=&showViewpoints=1&colid=&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending [amazon.com]