Have You Paid A Hacker Today?
Are you paying people who are members of organized crime or political extremist groups? Are you financially supporting criminals? I posted back in February that this was a developing story. At last it is here. The recording of Wayne Porter and Chris Boyd’s presentation at RSA2007. As a Network, Merchant, Manager, OPM or Affiliate why should you care about botnets, let alone the security folks who are chasing them?
Because this Industry is helping to fund them, from the hackers who own the botnet rings and are installing scripts to fill out lead gen forms to the adware applications they are installing through the botnets. And the money trail can lead to some pretty unsavory places.
Listen and watch the presentation.
Botnet Live: Tracing, Chasing and Building the Case to Bust the Bad Guys
Can we continue to remain complacent? Apathetic? Are the standards in the Industry how much money someone is making regardless of how it’s being made?
Go ahead take the time to watch the presentation. Be prepared to have an eye opening experience about some of the things going on out there.
Thank you for posting the presentation link. It was interesting. I find botnets “fascinating” in a sick way. I tend to call them the “cake” and adware the “icing on the cake”. I will definitely be reading up more on that.
Catwoman
Comment by Catwoman — April 5, 2007 @ 8:25 pm
Merchants and Networks really need to wake up to where some of their dollars are going, hence what they are actually helping to fund. “I didn’t know” isn’t good enough. Is this really the type of stuff we want connected with this industry? IMO, turning a blind eye to it is just as bad as allowing it.
Comment by Kellie AFP — April 6, 2007 @ 1:06 am
Unfortunately…
[quote]Are the standards in the Industry how much money someone is making regardless of how it’s being made?[/quote]
I read this in forums all the time and for many (both affiliates and merchants) that’s exactly what matters - how much money they make regardless of how it is generated.
Some merchants turn a blind eye to spam because it makes sales, and that’s probably even more true in the adult industry. However, these days I get a lot more mainstream spam than porn, so… who knows?
They turn a blind eye to adware because they THINK it makes them more money. But most times, if not 100% of the time, that’s far from being the case.
The bottomline is still the same, it makes them money and probably costs very little.
I think that the rental/trading of “bots” is what makes the most money. I call adware the icing on the cake because it’s extra bucks for downloads, not necessarily their main source of income. Maybe I’m totally wrong, I need to read up more on that.
Here I think it’s important to distinguish adware from spyware/malware. I know I’ve been guilty more often than not about calling everything spyware, but there are instances where it’s important to see the difference. Although everything seems to be interrelated in one way or another.
I find it interesting to see how it’s done, how they’re discovered, and what they can do once they get their bots, you know, how it all works. I wish I had more technical knowledge to dig deeper into that dark side of the cyberworld.
It’s a very sophisticated ring that few people understand and even fewer know about. Even in this day and age… for so many, just the mention of “adware” is like a foreign language to their ears, how do you explain botnets to them?
Catwoman
Comment by Catwoman — April 6, 2007 @ 2:05 pm