Virus writers have girlfriends - official
Source Title:
Virus writers have girlfriends
Virus writers have girlfriends
Story Text:
Have you always thought of virus writers as spotty nerds who can't pull, well according to an expert on the psychology of virus writers this is apparently just not true...
Have you always thought of virus writers as spotty nerds who can't pull, well according to an expert on the psychology of virus writers this is apparently just not true...
For years, Gordon has attended conferences and conventions attended by virus writers and corresponded with them online as a way of better understanding the motives behind virus creation.... She is over in Europe to complete final work on a thesis for her PhD in computer science.
"Most of the adult males I've interviewed have had girlfriends. Female virus writers have had boyfriends. The stereotypes are wrong,"
If you cannot make money out of it, I doubt that TW readers would be interested in spreading viruses. But it is at least comforting to know that these people are "normal". One wonders if the write of this article is heading for Stansted in the near future.
- Y! MyWeb
hmmm
Are we sure they're not of the "blow-up" variety? ;)
Many kinds of virus writers
- and she may not have touched them all ...
What about the NSA? What about Al Queda? What about other forms of (national or not) terrorists and powers to be? I beleiev there are many kinds of virus writers and the least dangerous are probably the geeky single ones ...
I doubt that TW readers would be interested in spreading viruses
What about an ultra advanced click bot hidden in a virus? I know some SEOs that would love that - to kill all PPC as we know it ... I am 99% sure such bots WILL see the light the only questions is: When and what will the engines do about it? If it happend tomorrow I am pretty sure none of the engines would not have any proper defense - just like it's true with "normal" viruses. If some of the terrorists that undoubtly is behind some of the "test" viruses we see decides to suddenly launch a new virus or worm every day for a year we are all fucked! Nothing can stop that today
...?
Viruses and trojans are the new moneymakers for those willing to break the rules. Check out this newspaper story about how "virus writing has evolved into a lucrative industry, with spammers, mobsters and blackmailers in on the act."
Between using the paid-for viruses and trojans to disable or modify anti-spyware software and install adware on a machine and turning zombified PCs into open-mail spam relays, online industrial sabotage stepping stones or good old DDoS attacks against competitors, there's plenty of money to be made.
For me, the latest problem involves blog spam coming from "bot-nets" of zombified PCs running some of the new distributed blog spam software that's been popping up.
How do you know? does it leave a track?
(no need to publish the track)
For the most part the bigger operations have easier to spot patterns, in that you'll get a huge influx of comment and referrer spam that contains the same targetted link but come from multiple IPs that belong to dynamically assigned pools owned by broadband ISPs.
Last week I had the same comment spam added to every single entry on my blog, yet the addresses ended up coming from residential IPs from multiple ISPs, including Earthlink DSL, Comcast, Adelphia and Time Warner.
In most cases, the virus isn't all that sophisticated, so it simply turns the PC into an open relay, which the latest version of WordPress can detect and deny comments from, but you still end up with referrer spam.
I read a pretty indepth article on the use of "bot nets" a couple of months ago, but can't remember where it was from. If I see some good URLs, though, I'll try and post them.
Although it's annoying from a blog owner's viewpoint, the technological side is kind of interesting.
of course they have GF's
what a load of bull - one thing is stereotypes, another is taking them seriously as much as to do research about it. I bet some of them might even commute to their regular 9-5 job.
Here, Derek:
(edit: i didn't think vegetarians were a good example of a "normal type" after all :-)
Thanks for the links, claus.
And you're definitely correct, the stereotypes of old are pretty worthless now that even the world of virus writing has become as commercialized as it has.
Sure, there are still plenty of dumb kids writing annoying viruses, but there's also a pretty technical criminal element at work as well these days who are much better at not getting caught.