Tim Yang’s Blog

This is an interesting post on a forum about how someone had his mobile phone stolen and the funny series of events that led to the capture of the thief. The thief had used the camera on the phone to take pictures of himself, his girlfriend and a amateur sex video. Unfortunately for the thief, the owner had set up an automatic posting routine on the phone. Whenever a photo was sent from the phone, it saved a copy on his Sprint website. So he got an update of all the thief’s activities.

An interesting analysis from Newsfactor regarding the changing hacker culture that produced Zotob and other recent worms. It says there is a kind of competitiveness among hackers that’s driving each of them to be more conservative in their experimentation. They’re starting to draw less and less attention while at the same time starting to see the more strategic side of hacking.

In today’s murky world of digital viruses, worms, and Trojan horses, the idea is to stay quiet and use hijacked computers to flood the Internet with spam, spread destructive viruses, or disgorge e-mail to choke corporate systems. Not only can networks of these compromised computers be leased or sold, experts say, they are becoming more valuable as the number of vulnerable computers slowly shrinks. The viruses of yesteryear, “where something would get on your system and blow away your boot sector just doesn’t happen that much anymore.”

Cnet has an interesting story of Gary Mckinnon a London guy who managed to bypass the security of the Department of Defense as well as the NASA computers. And he got caught for it. But his story takes an interesting turn after that.

He makes the distinction between bypassing and hacking because he insists he merely found a “blank system level administrator password” and didn’t cause a breach to happen. Yet he is fighting an extradition order that accuses him of “hacking and causing damage to federal defense systems”. Causing damage is another point of contention. The U.S. Department of Justice have all but labelled him a terrorist and accuse him of willful destruction of irreplaceable information. But the way that Mckinnon tells it, that as he was leaving the system, the damage was accidental and that the damage was far less than what the Americans accuse him of. In other words, Mckinnon is being demonised and made a patsy for things he had nothing to do with. There’s more information on the Free Gary Mckinnon blog.

Here’s an interesting discussion on Slashdot that proposes that DDOS attacks be initiated against identified phishing sites. One of the proposers says that an orchestrated DDOS will survive longer than the Makelovenotspam initiative last year because phishers are not always technical. Also, phishing sites are easier to identify with no chance of a mistake, unlike spam servers which are often shared with legitimate users or are compromised.

SpamSlayer - should we DDOS spammers?