Topic: Confession's of a Bitcoin Botnet coder... (Read 20237 times)

I'd rather have botnets than ASICs validating my TXs.  Botnets are more in line with Satoshi's vision. 

that is why people keep saying that ASIC's are a good thing for bitcoin in the end.. if each ASIC is worth the 10,000 CPU's then it'll be a lot easier to keep botnet network % down.

I don't know about that. He had a relatively small botnet. Unfortunately, botnets are a thing that tends to scale well -- up to a point. Further, there is no margin cost for adding another bot to the network. Another user becoming infected and mining would all be automated. ASICS merely provide incentive for botnets to get bigger. Plus, the existing botnets at smaller sizes are going to become LESS profitable, but still profitable. Hashing power is still hashing power. So, there is still incentive to spend $5 for a 500 node botnet. Crime pays after all -- until you get caught.

asics will destroy his operation , botnets wont be profitable any more

Very subtle sarcasm? In a forum? New to the internet, aincha?

Interesting read, thanks for the post!

Good one, next time use a smiley 

You must have missed the sarcasm and virtual eye roll.

You're new to the internet, aincha?

This isn't unexpected. Hey look, computers can print money (kind of) if only there were a way to take over LOTS of computers. Hummm. Oh yeah, a botnet. Geniuses that put that one together. It would be nice to see some diligence from the pools to find and arrest people that are breaking the law.

Exactly correct, the reason there isn't much malware development for osx or linux is because the market share just isn't large enough to make it profitable. I know because I do virus removals for my living. Average day I get ~10 pcs 2 macs... about once every 2 months I get a linux user who I get to laugh at and say "just nuke the box".

But I do have to say this, the vast majority of infections are detected by AV like norton, trend or kapersky. All of the potentially useful malware is well defined and nearly impossible to hide. Most of my business comes from people who were informed by AV that a virus was found and removed. Then it's a 20 or 30 min thing for me to remove the source (whatever trojan/dropper/rootkit) they've actually got. And that's if I have to manually track it down and kill it use AR/PE/HJT. in the vast majority of cases TK and MBAM catch everything.

Additionally, most AVs now monitor performance, and would alert the user if resources had high usage. Heck it took the AV community (and virus removal techs specifically) all of 2 days to identify Zero.Access, a week later it was defined, and a week after that we had a reliable removal process pushed out to every av source that matters.

TimeTillDeath on your average botnet (remote administration tool) is a few days or weeks at best. Assuming the user had an AV installed first.

My gosh people, Stop with all the OS and AV talk.

Odds are that 95% of infected comps are owned by Fucking Idiots.

Any Fucking Idiot on any operation system can get infected, CAN

Nah, ASIC corrects this issue pretty much. Botnets will be more profitable doing something else when they come along.

I got to give him credit for what some of these botnet coders achieve (the programming side), doing this on the scale it's done is not easy and staying undetected of course even harder. He has released a bit too much information, frankly he's probably shot himself in the foot if any wanted to actually figure out who he was now.

However I do kinda hope they get caught out since this does damage the reputation of bitcoin by a negative association.
The masses still don't understand bitcoin, this is not helping.

You mean exploit kits, not irc bots.

The only thing I can remember from my IT classes on highschool is this:
"There's no anti-virus against human stupidity!"

It served me well... so far...
Too bad I didn't learn anything else on those classes, but that statement remained lol

Well said. Same story here.

Nobody is out to get savvy users like me and you. No point being paranoid. Check out wilders security forums to see those guys using 10 bulletproof vests

They are out to get idiots who click on anything they see shiny

Nothing can protect those dumb users ...

No AV here, haven't used one in 8+ years. Last time I did, it didn't like the contents of my file server and never used one again.

Windows security is irrelevant, they are looking at market share. That's why osx was "secure" and is now trickling to becoming "unsecure."

Security by obscurity is delusion many people don't acknowledge.

I've downloaded literally 10's of terabytes of stuff of the internet. I've never lost my identity, never got hacked, never had toolbar problems.

A good nat router is simply amazing against penetration for the money and skill level needed to install. I used to browse in a VM. That become a pain. I just turned off all the potential problems (flash, java, active-x). Problem solved. Last time I checked... html doesn't ruin your day.

If anyone here seriously thinks that any AV out there will protect him from a determined/experienced spreader they have another thing coming. The people who spread these things pay a measly $40 - $60 for an always updated crypter to make any RAT(Remote Administration Tool) or BTC miner bypass their AV. Hell, the AV waves at said trojan and says thanks for coming.

Hell, people even make IRC bots that infect up to 20% of their traffic if they're good. You could simply visit a website and get infected. Its that simple. The people who do this stuff make a lot of money because they're generally really good at what they do.

Edit: moral of the story, dont go download everything you see, dont lurk around fishy parts of the internet.