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To the guy that keeps leaving all the Indianpad spam.

1. I verify all comments before they are approved.
2. Your redirection links are broken anyways.

   Error: can't open redirects.log file
   Possible reasons:
   1) cron is not working (read FAQ)
   2) there is no urls in this scheme
   3) there is no such scheme or use     (LMAO)

3. Just because you use a different name, I can still tell who you are because I see your IP address.
4. Comments that are just links, unless related to the original post, will get deleted and never see the light of day (or a single pixel).
5. Comments with links to a pharmacy, especially in India, will get deleted. I don’t need your fake, or real Viagra
6. I know how to spoof my IP too, so changing your IP or using a proxy, won’t fool me.
7. It bums me out when I see I g0t a bunch of comments, just to find out they are all spam.
8. If your gonna leave spam for comments, why not do it in a recent post, not one I made months ago that no one will read anyways.
9. I think I’ll have some fun with nmap and the IP’s your spam is being posted from.
10. Thanks for stopping by and leaving comments.

Sincerely,

Your freindly neighborhood admin and computer security specialist

PS. I think I’ll make a account at Indian Pad and leave spam of my own and copy your spam to it.

Here’s a crazy story. And you read the title correctly. Normally I would reserve this story for my tech blog over at www.pccybertek.com, but I let the domain expire and I’m waiting for it to be reactivated. And this was so crazy, I couldn’t let it pass by.

It turns out that the BBC has a tech show called Click, and they wanted to show how easy it was to create a botnet, so they did. That’s right, the BBC hijacked over 22,000 computers to prove a point. Isn’t that illegal?!?! According to the BBC, what they did wasn’t against the law because they did it on the right side of the law.

“If this exercise had been done with criminal intent it would be breaking the law.

But our purpose was to demonstrate botnets’ collective power when in the hands of criminals.”

Huh?!? So if I wanted to show how easy it was to make money selling drugs, to prove my point I could? Or maybe I want to demonstrate how easy it is to kill someone by shooting them in the head, I could blast away and then say “I’m just trying to prove my point. I’m not a criminal or doing it with criminal intent, so it’s ok.  By that logic, there’s a lot of hackers out there that shouldn’t be prosecuted because many of them break into computers, just to see if they can. They aren’t doing it with criminal intent, they just want to prove to themselves that thye have the skills to do it.

After they hijacked the 22,000 computers they used them to spam some e-mail addresses and to do a denial of service attack. Both of which were successful. They did have permission from a security firm to try the denial of service attack, also know as DDOS, on a backup server. And it only took 60 computers to bring down the site.

They say the the botnet has now been shut down, and they have told the victims of the hijack, how to clean the infection and how to patch their computers. One of the things that bothers me about this is they didn’t get permission from any of these people first. Also, being a tech for the last 23 years, I know that installing any program on that many computers is bound to cause a certain percentage of them to crash. I can’t belive they could be that irresponsable and think that they wouldn’t cause anyone any damage or downtime. What about the people that noticed something funny going on with their computer and either spent hours trying to fix it or paid a tech to repair it. What if some of these computers were with an ISP that limits the bandwidth they can use per month, like the cable company does where I live, and then charge you for your overage. Seems like someone didn’t think this through very well. If the BBC doesn’t get charged for breaking laws, I think there’s a good chance of a civil or class action lawsuit. We will see.

If you’d like to see the BBC’s side of the story, check it out here.

I’d really like to hear your thoughts on this. Please leave me a comment about this story.