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Men who spy on women through their webcams
- niels_olson 14y agowhy are all the screenshots of Windows machines?
- cocoflunchy 14y agoI think that's why: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system...
- orbitingpluto 14y agoAren't most of the screenshots of what you are seeing the script kiddies computer point of view? There were only ~3 screenshots that show the victims OS GUI. OSX usage is what, 8%? .92.92.92 = 78% chance? I hope you're not taking the article as evidence that you are 'safe' on your choice of OS. The first time I ever felt that my privacy was violated on a computer I was a using NeXT slab.
- dfc 14y agoI'm not that familiar with NeXT, what are you referring to? SGI's Indycam was the first time I was exposed to hardware that had privacy designed in.
- rpgmaker 14y agoHeh, probably their RAT clients don't support Linux.
- aw3c2 14y ago* People who spy on people through their webcams The article itself had several images of male humans.
- pixl97 14y agoThese poor guys where born in the wrong countries, here they are poor slobs forced to illegally install shifty software to watch their 'slaves'. Had they been born in China, Egypt, or any of the number of countries with strict internet monitoring they could now be employed by the state monitoring dissidents. There is still hope for them, if they do good in college the NSA may still hire them.
- archivator 14y agoReally? And why would the NSA be interested in the services of simple scammers? These are not hackers, crackers or anyone with sophisticated skills. They're just scamming people into installing what is essentially a pimped-out VNC server. I bet there even aren't any exploits involved in getting access to the features that they use, just standard APIs. All in all, I doubt the NSA (or any TLA) would hire them.
- ewbuoi 14y agoI noticed the article said they use the VNC feature and the Device Manager and My Computer Properties window to find hardware info like serial numbers. I've heard of that forum before, I think 90% of the community found it by typing "how to hack" into google, and the other 10% are profiting in some way.
- olefoo 14y agoIf the DHS gets into cybersecurity, that's about the level of the people they hire for airport security...
- CleanedStar 14y agoThat's what I was thinking. I've had skript kiddies who (probably automatically) broke into computers I ran in some form or another, usually no harm done. The idea of the government handing out national security letters all over the place, gagging ISPs, Google, whoever from even saying they'd been searched in past years, on top of the NSA monitoring, Room 641A split cables to everywhere - that is what freaks me out, not some random pervert who might hack a webcam and see me browsing HN in my bathrobe. When I was a young man, the president was having his reelection committee flunkies break into the Democratic party headquarters to bug it, and if those political shenanigans have gone on, you can imagine the bugging and monitoring of people like Martin Luther King Jr., Fred Hampton, and the anti-war people who were monitored back then and who Michael Moore shows are still under surveillance in Fahrenheit 9/11. The dangerous anti-war hippies in Peace Fresno.
- krichman 14y agoHopefully in the future when all users can install trusted root certificates and only run software that is signed by a descendent we won't have this bullshit.
- satori99 14y agoPeople that do this are evil.
- chrischen 14y agoAs the article suggests, the people who do this are probably 14 year old boys.
- veb 14y agoIt's been going on for a loooooong time. Sub7 anyone? I'm sure most of us were once 14, and unsupervised and didn't do anything evil.
- psionski 14y agowolf3d.exe on a floppy -> "This self-extracting zip archive is corrupted!" :P P.S. Now that I typed the file's name (it was really wolf3d.exe), I suddenly feel old... Not to mention the "floppy" bit :)
- DrJokepu 14y agoBy the age of 14 you are supposed to have a developed enough sense of morality to understand that this is very bad. I don't think this is an acceptable excuse.
- kalleboo 14y agoOne way of learning is by making mistakes
- satori99 14y agoHow many slaves, oops, I mean mistakes, do you think it takes to learn that this is a bad thing to do?
- rayiner 14y agoThat's just a stupid Americanism.[1] You don't need to do a bunch of wrong things to learn what's wrong. You learn what's right and wrong because your parents tell you what's right and wrong, and society and school socializes you to teach you what's right and wrong. If you get to 14 and need to scare someone like this to learn what's right and wrong, you're either defective or your parents and teachers have failed at their jobs. More likely, you know it's wrong and you just don't care. [1] I'm an American and love America, but we elevate apologizing for bad things kids do (because we don't have the stomach to properly discipline them) to an art form.
- swang 14y agoI feel like its 1998 and everyone has discovered Back Orifice again.
- Brajeshwar 14y agoAh! Cult of the Dead Cow.
- umphetico 14y agoAh yes. My early days in junior high school were spent trying to infect the school library computers so I could use free internet. Nostalgia.
- Andrenid 14y agoI honestly thought this was another one of those "Let's post a 10 year old article to reminisce" posts... To be honest, i'm semi-impressed this is still a thing. I assumed it had died in the late 90s. It's also scary of course, that these people seem to have antivirus running and it hasn't stopped it. Seems like a pretty trivial thing to detect?
- wuest 14y agoThe problem is that the behavior itself is rarely viral. What's the difference between this and, for example, gotomypc?
- xyzzy123 14y agoAntivirus is much less effective than most people believe. The problem is that the AV is "entrenched" and the malware is "mobile" Malware authors can simply tweak or repack their code until the AV engines don't detect it anymore. Getting around behavioral detection is harder, but possible. If malware is privileged it becomes an arms race of who can hook lowest and who can disable who.
- jiggy2011 14y agoAgreed, I don't bother with AV software for myself anymore the performance penalty and nagging isn't worth it. I tend to notice a correlation between people who have problems with malware/spyware/crapware and people who have AV software installed and it's the opposite of what you might expect. Perhaps people who install it get a false sense of security? AV software tends to be either ineffective in that it doesn't detect a lot of actual malware or it is constantly generating a lot of false positives which people just learn to ignore "Tracking cookie detected! Your life is in danger!".
- tlrobinson 14y agoIn June 2012, the FBI arrested Michael "xVisceral" Hogue at his home in Tucson, Arizona and charged him with selling "malware that allows cybercriminals to take over and control, remotely, the operations of an infected computer." First of all, I don't condone this behavior, and using such software for "ratting" should obviously be illegal, but is it really illegal to sell this type of software (or any malware)? It seems incredibly dangerous to make software illegal based on it's potential illegal uses. I recall a controversy about a "hacking tools" law in Germany a few years ago, but never in the US. What law would this fall under, if any?
- Confusion 14y agoIf you sell software with features that could only reasonably used for illegal activitities, such as sending you the creditcard number someone is entering, then: a resounding YES! Also if you advertise features for illegal use, even if they could be used for legal things.
- keithpeter 14y agoI recollect that the German law was written in a way that would logically classify gcc as a hacking tool, i.e. the definition was very broad. I'd be interested in the definition/ law being used here.
- wuest 14y agoThat's beside the point. There are plenty of valid uses for other things which would have been criminalized such as Metasploit and Core Impact. Not to mention that such things as writing PoC code to validate vulnerabilities would have been right out of the question.
- keithpeter 14y agoI accept what your point which I take to be that a law or regulation that attempted a narrow definition of tools thought to be for criminal purposes would still criminalise legitimate activities. It is the activity that should be against the law, not possession of the software. I was just wondering what the law used in this case was.
- strictfp 14y agoI'm surprised that the article doesn't mention Netbus, which was out before BackOrifice.
- rtb 14y agoBreaking news: people do immoral shit on the internet. Luckily you can read all about it on arstechnica, including lots of voyeuristic photos you can look at "for research".
- kahawe 14y agoBreaking news: people do immoral shit. Regardless of where or when.
- foohbarbaz 14y agoThe root of the problem here is that 1. A lot (most) people do not have any security enabled on their PCs (logged in as admin at all times) 2. Majority of software installs require admin privileges by default. Of course, the guilty party here is the software developers that are unwilling to do anything about the status quo. Also the vendors, Microsofts, Apples and Redhats. These days it is getting even more common and acceptable to install binary packages on a system as root and often in unattended manner (OS and package "updates", pray-and-run RPM installs, etc). More so, there used to be some hope in this area by Apple, where you would just copy an app to install, w/o being an admin. Now even Apple is moving to store apps where every install seems to want an admin. Linux and Windows people have been always lost in that regard: MSI and RPM/whatnot have always been unquestioned standard (Linux people, however, have a choice to not install software as root and build it locally when necessary). Until this (admin installs) changes, we are going to have to deal with malware. Fixing this would not solve all the issues, but would help a lot. In the meantime, enjoy your PC owned by some teenagers overseas.
- nodata 14y ago> Until this (admin installs) changes, we are going to have to deal with malware. Fixing this would not solve all the issues, but would help a lot. This is a hopelessly misguided argument. Could you maybe explain your reasoning a bit? The argument for requiring admin rights to install is that the binaries are not user infectable. Now whether or not this leads to other problems is a different matter, but I don't see how making binaries user writeable on a box which receives automatic updates is going to make everything more secure...
- foohbarbaz 14y agoThe reasoning is simple: if no random third parties ever get full control of your machine, than most likely the OS is going to stay intact (with the exception of possible local privilege escalation exploits). If the OS is intact, the job of checking whether a user environment is compromised is easy and actually doable (as opposed to the case of trying to find malware on a compromised OS). If, in addition, a user account has limited privileges (which it should of course), then even when compromised the chances of malware being able to do a lot are a lot less. For instance, turning off a webcam light being a root is probably easy, otherwise probably not. Setting up a server, listening for incoming connections and punching a hole in local firewall as root is available, but as a regular user is not. Stop giving admin rights to your computer to random people (install software as an admin) and live much happier. As an additional benefit, there's never a situation 'I installed this and now computer is messed up, because Joe-the-dev ran "rm -f " with a wrong path as a parameter'.
- kayoone 14y agoI am sure alot of those infected pcs still run XP, so one could argue that these type of things go away as the more secure operating systems spread. Then again, if people continue to execute some shady stuff found on the internet, the OS doesnt really matter all that much.
- sah2ed 14y agoWindows 7 may be more secure than XP but that doesn't make it immune to this type of infection. The "OS" column in this screen shot[1] from the article has a number of "Windows 7" victims. [1] http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/bs1x.jpg http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/bs1x.j...
- lmm 14y agoAm I alone in feeling uncomfortable at the article's consistent use of "slaves"? This is very different from slavery, and if it's the perpetrators' term then it seems like buying into their worldview.
- alphamale99 14y agoits insane, how many times the author used the word slaves
- pimentel 14y agoIt is the perpetrator's term. At the end of the article: > prepare to be sold or traded to the kind of person who enters forums to ask, "Can I get some slaves for my rat please?"
- Tichy 14y agoIt's because the ratters use it to refer to their victims.
- drharris 14y agoIt most likely derives from "master/slave" relationships like client/server. "Slave" is chosen since makes adolescent boys feel like they have power. The author is merely using the community's terminology.
- AutoCorrect 14y agoyeah, I kind of thought the writer was at least a bit in awe of the ratters. I would have called them victims, instead. Why perpetuate the vernacular?
- Millennium 14y agoThe master/slave terminology has a history in technological circles, typically being used to describe situations where one device is used to control another device. It actually predates computers; you can find examples in mechanical and hydraulic machinery going much further back. As far as that context goes, the term is accurate for what RATs do: the hacker's "master" device can be used to control what the "slave" machines do. I assume that this is the context in which these people are using those terms. But it is, admittedly, somewhat jarring for people unfamiliar with that context.
- tunaman7787 14y agoGood article. I always check my iMac and MacBook LEDs. Can never be too careful. Sometimes I wonder if the Internet is all Travis Bickles doing pull-ups and yelling at their monitor in the dark. There are some desperate and lonely people out there. http://cnp-keythai.com/speaker-mesh http://cnp-keythai.com/speaker-mesh
- lollancf37 14y agoWhat's wrong with those bastards ?
- alphamale99 14y ago"Amanda todd", in canada died because of these ratters. They are rotten people who do this to innocent girls,they bullied her to death. This same(dark,whatever )service will be used to make these girls slaves for pornography on cam....it must stop, its being used by human traffickers, who will threaten her and than make her real computer slave. This needs to stop, we are better human race than this.
- bingobingo 14y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Amanda_Todd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Amanda_Todd
- lttlrck 14y agoThat just ruined my day.
- sharjeel 14y agoCould anyone comment about this issue in mobile devices? On Desktop one can get suspicious when the LED of the Webcam blinks but on Mobile Phones, the camera is a completely silent watcher. And it is shocking to imagine how we carry around our mobile devices everywhere compared to desktops and laptops.
- Tichy 14y agoI'm sure it exists, or will come into existence. Why not? Challenges might be slower connection speed.
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoOoh, and mobile phones have less security-concious users and often no AV software. Seems like a major oversight. On that note, Japanese law requires cameraphones sold there to always make a loud shutter sound upon taking a picture, to prevent voyeurism etc. This is why the Nintendo 3DS handheld console's shutter sound can't be silenced.
- brndn 14y agoSame goes for the camera on the Sprint GS3.
- kamme 14y agoYes, a led that lights up does sound pretty suspicious to you and me, but if you don't know anything about computers and you see it on all the time it becomes natural. The same phenomena as clicking 'yes' and 'ok' buttons without reading anything.
- throwaway125 14y agoThe users at hackforums are terribly incompetent. These kids all run their command and control center on their local computer. The RAT has one (or several) free dns name(s) embedded and the user keeps updating those with his home ip to receive connections from them. How hard would it be to launch an investigation into this ip address once you find it out? Would filing John Doe lawsuit allow you to do discovery on those ip addresses? Does 'an ip address is not a person' prevent you from further investigating who the actual person was?
- skeletonjelly 14y agoIn the linked PDF in the article written by the FBI agent the IP address is used as a piece of evidence in addition to other evidence like emails with addresses and names, so I guess the answer is yes.
- tomjen3 14y agoNot hard at all. Almost certainly. You should be able to get a warrent and these kids will crack when start talking about juvie at that point an ip address isn't a person doesn't really matter because a confession is (mostly) admissible in court.
- gadders 14y agoMan, some people are weird.
- martinced 14y agoWhich is why I hate laptops on which you cannot physically block the webcam. Laptops used to have a little slider that could cover the webcam but nowadays they don't anymore!? I love my MacBook and MacBook Pro but... I'm putting a little piece of paper on the webcam "just in case". Oh and the difference between nowadays and BO in the 90's is that nowadays virtually everybody who has a laptop has a webcam. That's quite a big difference.
- Millennium 14y agoElectrical tape is good for blocking webcams.
- pavel_lishin 14y agoI've always heard that bandaids are the way to go - electrical tape can gunk up your webcam when you actually want to use it.
- tomjen3 14y agoI have had some success with aluminum foil (the kind you might want to use in a kitchen) -- place that over the webcam lense and then use whateever tape you want to use to hold it in place.
- pavel_lishin 14y agoI have my camera set to take a picture every 20 minutes, but when I need privacy I just stick a post-it over the thing, and fold it down.
- davej 14y agoThe green light next to the webcam will come on when the camera is in use on MacBooks. It is programmed to come on at the hardware layer so unless somebody has physical access to your MacBook then it will always come on.
- joshaidan 14y agoI remember a few years ago the Privacy Commissioner of Canada was going all out on Google for capturing data from open wifi connections, which Google promptly deleted. It was a huge story for the Privacy Office, and to me it felt like the story was being exploited to boost the profile of the Office--they made it sound like a much bigger deal than it actually was. Now, here is an issue that I think is a much bigger problem, and has been going on for a long time with very little word from the Privacy Commissioner. Why hasn't the Commissioner gone after Microsoft in the same way they went after Google? This is caused by a fundamental flaw in Microsoft's products, and I don't think having to purchase and install security software should be the solution. Fix the software itself.