No worries Elem, it's clearly my own blunder, but I appreciate your
reassurance. I came onto the forum really frustrated because the
proliferation of zombie hosts is getting to be a real problem.
In the past these hosts were mainly used by crackers or script-kiddies to
perform distributed denial of service attacks mainly for pranks
or revenge. Now it's started to become a sort of pseudo-business
where these owned hosts are being programmed to generate income
by generating false site-visits and click-throughs. It's now financially
feasible to set up a domain, web-hosting and false content solely for
the purpose of acquiring new hosts via a new exploit and people are
doing this.
Many people in the IT industry think themselves invulnerable to this
kind of threat merely because they deploy hardened firewalls and a
NIDS (network intrusion detection system). Crackers are now tailoring
their exploits (mainly buffer overflows) to avoid matching signatures
in the NIDS' ruleset by obfuscating nop-slides and subsequent code
etc. Most of the new exploits pass right through the NIDS without
generating a single event.
Now, you try and convince some of these people that they need to start
taking extra precautions and about half of them respond with sarcasm
indicating 'well, only *stupid* net-admins would ever be unaware that
one of their hosts was compromised' and that a call to action is just
spreading paranoia. At about this point all the crackers and script kiddies
chime in to eagerly support this viewpoint and help all the 'experts' feel
smarter with obsequious pats on the back. This generally drives me
into a rage. I should be more mature at my age.
If some of the things which are going on on the internet right now
were happening 'in real life' people would be up in arms. It's hard to
think of a good analogy but it would be like streets filled with litter and
strangers are using your car to pick up groceries when you're not
watching.
That being said, it's hard to address this sort of thing without causing
undo worry. The internet really isn't filled with hidden dangers around
every corner. I think 'common sense' just hasn't adapted itself
to the modern age of the internet to the point where it's automatic.
Software vendors aren't taking enough responsibility either, but
the cost of providing safer software is prohibitive and would immediately
make a development house non-competitive.
It's sad really, given the kind of atmosphere with which the internet
started out. What a rant, and not very original
. . . . . . . . .
Be aware.
. . . . . . . . .
computers can be dangerous i guess.
.