Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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".


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 3, Informative) by gidds on Wednesday August 17 2016, @02:00PM

    by gidds (589) on Wednesday August 17 2016, @02:00PM (#389108)

    Extensions have one other advantage, and I'm surprised it's not been mentioned yet:

    You can have two files with the same base name but different extensions.  (You can't have two files with the same name but different type/creator codes.)

    Now, anyone who's compiled XXX.c (and maybe XXX.h) to XXX.o, XXX.a, XXX.dll, and/or XXX.exe should be able to see the advantage of that.

    That's one reason why I (a Mac user) found type/creator codes extremely annoying in Mac OS Classic.  The other was the way that the creator code always 'trumped' the type code.  I may have umpteen programs capable of reading text files, but I want them all to open in the same program by default, regardless which one happened to write it last.  Creator codes prevented that.

    FWIW, there's at least one more solution to the problem of identifying file types.  EPOC (the OS used by Psion computers) tries to identify a file by looking at the first 24 bytes.  Files created by most of the built-in apps use these to store file type information, and many other common file types (JPEGs, ZIPs, &c) can be recognised in the same way.  (It falls back to the filename extension when that fails.)

    The advantages of this are that it doesn't need any support from the filesystem, and is preserved when the file is transferred; it's also preserved if the file is renamed, and if it's streamed or embedded &c.

    --
    [sig redacted]
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Informative=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Informative' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   3