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How I got tech support scammers infected with Locky
- knodi123 10y agomirror, anyone?
- awqrre 10y agohttp://archive.is/NRcnQ http://archive.is/NRcnQ
- justicerage 10y agoHey everyone, blog owner here. It's hosted in my cupboard and the HN/Reddit traffic is killing my bandwidth :) Here are some alternate links if the site is down: https://archive.is/NRcnQ https://archive.is/NRcnQ https://i.imgur.com/NR6pvkn.png https://i.imgur.com/NR6pvkn.png http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://blog.kwiatkowski.fr/%3Fq%3Den/node/30&num=1&strip=1&vwsrc=0 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- walrus01 10y agoI'd love to see a traffic graph of your cupboard to know what an HN Slashdot effect looks like in Mbps/pps.
- justicerage 10y agoI'll be writing another blog article about this in a few days. I'm installing Splunk at the moment to see the metrics myself!
- nalllar 10y agoI use "cupboard hosting" too, but behind cloudflare free tier with aggressive caching.
- justicerage 10y agoI do not condone of Cloudflare and their way of making life impossible for Tor users.
- toomuchtodo 10y agoConsider running Varnish on a Digital Ocean node, pointing at your cupboard origin.
- justicerage 10y agoThat's a great suggestion. I'll definitely set this up.
- nalllar 10y agoI suggested a free caching solution specifically because you are using "cupboard hosting". This usually means you're trying to keep costs as low as possible. You can whitelist TOR users on cloudflare by setting up a rule for it, it's quite easy to do. Of course, you're free to choose not to support them/use their product as the default behaviour is to aggressively shove captchas ato TOR users.
- th0ma5 10y agoWhile I personally agree with your actions, I do wonder if it really is ethical to hack them back. Anyway, thanks, the more awareness of this BS, the better.
- reustle 10y agoHe just prevented a few people from being scammed, at least for some time. Sounds pretty ethical to me :-)
- mannykannot 10y agoI am interested in what the ethical argument against hacking them back is, unless it is simply 'hacking someone is on the list of things that are bad.' My attitude is basically one of 'implicit consent' - if you have done something bad, you have given implicit consent for something similar to be done to you. I like the symmetry, as it simplifies the argument, just as the Golden Rule does.
- scarmig 10y agoEthical argument against it: these companies are deeply unethical actors. The necessary and sufficient condition for their existence is their ability to take advantage of the gullible. But there is not and never will be the ability to swamp the gullibles' time with the time of highly paid professionals volunteering to troll. So it's really just a petty attempt to score internet points while not improving anything and selling/promoting an assumed moral high ground. I'm pretty sure that a majority of these moral attempts at trollsling end up being posted as a blog post, which itself is indicative of the real motivation. One might compare it to a school encouraging an environment where a heinous bully can do something really bad, and then an internet mob retaliates by making the bully's life a living hell. Yeah, you're hurting someone bad, but don't pretend it's motivated by trying to improve the world.
- justicerage 10y agoI think intent is irrelevant here. I did it in the spur of the moment, because it was funny and because in my eyes they deserve it - it's not like it was a premeditated attempt in the hopes of writing a blog post. In any case, I think acts are best judged based on their impact of the world, and not on random people's understanding of why they were performed. Here, we have (possibly) one less scammer on the job today, and more importantly, maybe a dozen or so new people who thought this was a good idea and will in turn try to make scammers' lives harder. So what if there'll never be enough people to totally wreck their business model? I think the world is a little bit better now, and that's good enough for me. Even if I had done it all just for a minute of fame, I don't think that would matter and/or change any of this.