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from the price-of-freedom-is-eternal-vigilence dept.
The mastermind behind some of the world's biggest and longest-running botnets has been jailed and his vast criminal infrastructure taken down, in part because of a careless operational security blunder that allowed authorities to identify his anonymous online persona.
Officials from the Republic of Belarus reported Monday they detained a participant in the sprawling Andromeda botnet network, which was made up of 464 separate botnets that spread more than 80 distinct malware families since 2011. On Tuesday, researchers with security firm Recorded Future published a blog post that said the participant was a 33-year-old Belarusian named Sergey Jarets.
To most people, Jarets was known only as "Ar3s," the moniker assigned to a highly respected elder in the criminal underground. In online discussions, Ar3s demonstrated expertise in malware development and the reverse-engineering of software. He also acted as a reputable guarantor of deals that were hashed out online. As it turned out, the ICQ number of the figure he used as one of his primary contact methods was registered in several whitehat discussion forums to one Sergey Jaretz.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Friday December 08 2017, @06:35PM (2 children)
Actually the enforcement of computer crimes is selective to the point it's discriminatory. If you'd go to the police saying "Someone hacked my PC!", will they investigate? But how would the police act if you were wealthy or a corporation? And to add insult to injury, who is paying the taxes for the police's salaries doing the investigation in the first place?
So, throw-in enough social injustice (say, those corporation avoiding paying their taxes by buying off politicians), and suddenly the criminals start looking less like the vile scam that they are, and more like Robin Hoods. Better yet, you can flip those corporations' trickle down economy rhetoric and argue that since those criminals aren't as efficient at laundering their cash as corporations are successful at avoiding taxes, all-in-all, more money ends up back in circulation thanks to their criminal endeavors.
p.s. This is a somewhat sarcastic take on Milton Friedman's work. Well, "somewhat sarcastic" since his son does actually makes VERY similar arguments in his talks...
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 08 2017, @10:11PM
I'm just going to leave this here and back away slowly...
https://www.ola.com/auction/992342/BUY-A-SENSE-OF-HUMOR [ola.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 10 2017, @03:15AM
[...] "But how would the police act if you were wealthy or a corporation?" [...]
They'd rob you blind & leave you for dead.