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Re: [Bug-gnubg] What's up with www.gnubg.org


From: Russ Allbery
Subject: Re: [Bug-gnubg] What's up with www.gnubg.org
Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2013 13:51:05 -0800
User-agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/23.4 (gnu/linux)

Mary Hickey <address@hidden> writes:

> I hope you catch the pimplefaced script-kiddie who did this. What good
> could possibly come of hacking a site where people like yourselves
> unselfishly work together to develop and improve a program that other
> people are then allowed to use for free? Make kids like him do some
> community service...and also publicize the fact that they are random
> cyber-vandals who don't, and probably can't, even write any interesting
> new code.

It's probably done for money, sadly, and they probably don't even know or
care what the site is for, since the attacks are probably all automated.

Compromised web hosting sites are used to stage fake copies of bank web
sites (for example) and then used in phishing in conjunction with email
spam to try to get people to go to those sites and enter their passwords
or other private information, at which point they're used to steal money.
Or, more innocuously, they're used to create artificial links to other web
sites for search engine spamming, again to make money.

It used to be that this sort of thing was mostly done by bored vandals.
These days, that's relatively rare.  Most of these attacks are automated
or semi-automated and done at a massive scale by organized crime or by
people hoping to sell the results to organized crime.  It's a similar case
for home computer viruses: compromised machines are rented out for
criminal activity, such as spamming or phishing, for about 50 cents a day.
If you can compromise ten thousand machines with an automated attack, you
can make significant money that way.

-- 
Russ Allbery (address@hidden)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>



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