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In my younger years I was very fascinated by malware, it's what got me into IT eventually. Back then I was active on some forums with marketplaces where one cou

In my younger years I was very fascinated by malware, it's what got me into IT eventually. Back then I was active on some forums with marketplaces where one could easily buy and sell such services. I didn't do anything serious besides some slightly gray area stuff, but never sold or bought anything or compromised any unwilling victim. I did know some people who were later caught by the FBI and spent a long time in prison though. In hindsight it's super crazy that this was a thing and probably still is. About these operations, I honestly think they're not that spectacular even though they make it seem so. Anyone can buy a license for a random botnet for a couple of bucks and reverse engineer what's going on on compromised systems. I'm sure most of these botnets are hacked together pieces of junk code, which gathered a lot of installs through sheer luck and the fact that the FBI was looking away for a while.

nahsra 3y ago
The FBI took control of the botnet and re-purposed it to patch the vulnerable machines. This sounds like a novel practice addition to me? I've done some limited consulting in this space in my career, and I agree that the code (and architecture) I've seen is pretty brittle junk. It's on par with the worst enterprise code I've seen. It's a numbers game for them. And, it's just a different work experience and skill tree that drives people to create "great code" (as it would be measured in professional software development circles.)
- asynchronous 3y ago
  It’s not novel at all - security researchers have been doing the same thing for literally decades. Worms often have kill switches built into them, that if the researchers can figure out allow them to stop it globally.
  - nahsra 3y ago
    I said it seemed like it might be a novel addition to their practice, not to the state of the art. The question isn’t “is this possible and has anyone ever done it” - it was was “has the FBI ever used a botnet’s existing C&C patch all the infected hosts”? It doesn’t seem like it, but I don’t track this stuff closely so I’m happy to be corrected.
deleted 3y ago
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nahsra 3y ago

The FBI took control of the botnet and re-purposed it to patch the vulnerable machines. This sounds like a novel practice addition to me? I've done some limited consulting in this space in my career, and I agree that the code (and architecture) I've seen is pretty brittle junk. It's on par with the worst enterprise code I've seen. It's a numbers game for them. And, it's just a different work experience and skill tree that drives people to create "great code" (as it would be measured in professional software development circles.)

asynchronous 3y ago
It’s not novel at all - security researchers have been doing the same thing for literally decades. Worms often have kill switches built into them, that if the researchers can figure out allow them to stop it globally.
- nahsra 3y ago
  I said it seemed like it might be a novel addition to their practice, not to the state of the art. The question isn’t “is this possible and has anyone ever done it” - it was was “has the FBI ever used a botnet’s existing C&C patch all the infected hosts”? It doesn’t seem like it, but I don’t track this stuff closely so I’m happy to be corrected.

deleted 3y ago

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