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posted by CoolHand on Tuesday August 16 2016, @04:28PM   Printer-friendly
from the vigilante dept.

Some may have heard of scambaiting spammers to waste their time and resources. There are many sites like 419eater which concentrate on it. However, Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story which takes things a step further. A French security researcher says he managed to turn the tables on a cyber-scammer by sending him malware. Whether or not that is ethical is left as an exercise for the readership.

But Ivan Kwiatkowski played along with the scheme until he was asked to send credit card details. He instead sent an attachment containing ransomware.

[...] When Mr Kwiatkowski's parents stumbled across one such website, he decided to telephone the company and pretend he had been fooled.

The "assistant" on the telephone tried to bamboozle him with technical jargon and encouraged him to buy a "tech protection subscription" costing 300 euros (£260).

Mr Kwiatkowski told the assistant that he could not see his credit card details clearly and offered to send a photograph of the information.

But he instead sent a copy of Locky ransomware disguised as a compressed photograph, which the assistant said he had opened.

"He says nothing for a short while, and then... 'I tried opening your photo, nothing happens.' I do my best not to burst out laughing," Mr Kwiatkowski wrote in his blog.

[...] Mr Kwiatkowski said he could not be absolutely certain whether the ransomware had infected the scammer's computer, but there was a fair chance it had.

"He did not let on that something had happened to his computer, so my attempt is best represented as an unconfirmed kill," said Mr Kwiatkowski.

"But encrypting a whole file system does take some time."

He acknowledged that some people may have found his retaliation unethical, but said responses had been "mostly positive".


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 16 2016, @09:06PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 16 2016, @09:06PM (#388831)

    Telling file types apart is one of the hard problems in computing. There is no simple (or even complex) way to tell file types apart that cannot be gamed by bad actors. Although, if you think you have a solution, I'm sure someone will tell you what is wrong with that technique and why it isn't/shouldn't be used.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 17 2016, @07:43AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 17 2016, @07:43AM (#389041)

    One thing I wish they had was that each file have both a filetype ( like .png ) for the human to see what it was, and a file structure header in the code to tell the computer what it was. If the two file descriptors did not match, it would throw an error. So, if it was an .MP4 file and you renamed it to "anything.mp4", it would still work, but if you renamed it to "anything.avi", it would no longer play, and throw an error saying the computer thinks its an .avi, but its labeled as a .mp4. Please rename it and resubmit.

    This should stop these sneaky programs telling the human its one thing while telling the computer its something else.