Steve’s Stuff

Continuing with yesterday’s theme –

John Dvorak’s Second Opinion: Conviction of ‘botmaster’ is tip of the iceberg

Few people reading about this guy have a clue as to what any of this means. I thought it would be a good idea to dedicate this column to explaining it since many people, I can assure you, have a computer that is compromised in some way by someone like this Ancheta character.

spam, Dvorak

If you’ve ever wanted to be a spammer, you can learn from the indictment (PDF) of Jeason James Acheta. Who? Check this article from the BBC.

“Mr Ancheta was responsible for a particularly insidious string of crimes,” said a spokesman for the US attorney’s office in Los Angeles, Thom Mrozek.

“He hijacked somewhere in the area of half a million computer systems. This not only affected computers like the one in your home, but it allowed him and others to orchestrate large-scale attacks.”

Under a plea agreement, Mr Ancheta is expected to receive from four years to six years in prison when he is sentenced on 1 May, though the deal has to be approved by a judge.

He also agreed to pay $15,000 in restitution to the military facilities affected and forfeit the proceeds of his illicit activities, including more than $60,000 in cash and a 1993 BMW.

spam

Steve Gibson created a bit of a web firestorm when he accused Microsoft of deliberately implementing a backdoor into Windows through the WMF vulnerability. Mark Russinovich writes
“given a choice of believing there was malicious intent or poor design behind this implementation, I’ll pick poor design”.

WMF

Mark Russinovich writes
“given a choice of believing there was malicious intent or poor design behind this implementation, I?ll pick poor design”.

Sometime overnight on January 5, the viruses went away. Well, not all of them, but the 10,000 Sober.U variants that had been pounding us stopped. It’s quiet out there…. too quiet.

Maybe this SANS warning is it. Look for corrupted user files on February 3.

The LA Times is reporting a new rumor about Google, Google PC, in this story: Industry Feeling Presence of the 800-Pound Google - Los Angeles Times Sources say Google has been in negotiations with Wal-Mart Stores Inc., among other retailers, to sell a Google PC. The machine would run an operating system created by Google, not Microsoft’s Windows, which is one reason it would be so cheap ? perhaps as little as a couple of hundred dollars.

Why? How do they make money from this?

If Google is going to do hardware, it will most likely be something along the lines of what Robert X. Cringley hs been suggesting in his PBS columns, probably a device that lets you get video from a Google datacenter located in your cyberspace neighborhood.

Google, Robert X. Cringley