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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Russian security outfit Dr. Web says it's found new malware for Linux.
The firms[sic] says the “Linux.Lady.1” trojan does the following three things:
- Collect information about an infected computer and transfer it to the command and control server.
- Download and launch a cryptocurrency mining utility.
- Attack other computers of the network in order to install its own copy on them.
The good news is that while the Trojan targets Linux systems, it doesn't rely on a Linux flaw to run. The problem is instead between the ears of those who run Redis without requiring a password for connections. If that's you, know that the trojan will use Redis to make a connection and start downloading the parts of itself that do real damage.
Once it worms its way in the trojan phones home to its command and control server and sends information including the flavour of Linux installed, number of CPUs on the infected machine and the number of running processes. The Register imagines that information means whoever runs the malware can make a decent guess at whether it is worth getting down to some mining, as there's little point working with an ancient CPU that's already maxed out.
(Score: 4, Informative) by n1 on Friday August 12 2016, @12:00PM
Glad you brought this up, have a few thoughts on this myself.
Firstly i'd be happy if we stopped using The Register's stupid 'hey buddy, we're cool too' headlines. Other than that, multiple el reg stories is a coincidence but does perhaps illustrate how good they are at drawing interest and clicks with their way of framing stories, being a tech tabloid isn't a bad thing for them.
Beyond that, there are times when we do approve stories by Arthur quicker than normal submissions, this is a decision made in the moment that could be for many reasons.
1) The stories that Arthur submits has already been filtered by an editor so they're usually worth running. As you can see still in the queue, my manual submissions as an editor don't get any special treatment.
2) Sometimes it's because it's quicker to deal with a general interest story found by Arthur than it is to try and make the dregs of the submissions queue into something worthwhile. This can be seen as lazy, but it's also a practical solution to keeping the content rolling at a reasonable level of quality.
3) Personally, I try to keep a mix of subjects/topics. I don't like running several Arthur stories in a row, but if it creates a broader spectrum of topics and potential discussions, it's worth it.
4) What you're seeing in the queue now is not necessarily what was there when the stories were chosen. Yesterday the last time i checked, we were down to a small number of low quality submissions (plus my awesome ones that no one wants to touch), The rest was Arthur, they're a lot of the ones that got picked up. The run of stories you're seeing now was cmn putting through a bunch literally moments before he went on vacation. I'd not be surprised to learn it was rushed... The rest of editorial was asleep or at work.
Every time you see Arthur, myself, takyon, martyb and even the IRC bots MrPlow and exec... We're often submitting these stories because either in our opinion, or in reality of a near empty queue, we don't have enough stories to run. Give us submissions to work with so we don't have to resort to internally generated submissions. There are stories every day that we miss, even when we're running lots. It's so easy to submit a story, but it's still too much work for most. Sometimes I wonder if people forget how the site works in regards to submissions.
Arthur came through necessity, there have been and continue to be periods on the site where 5-10 submissions a day of varying quality was all we'd get... still happens.... Arthur can be a crutch, but i don't think it's actually been a detriment to the quality of the site. Even so, we should be playing closer attention to the variety of sources when pushing through stories generated this way. I certainly don't want to give El Reg any more credit or attention than it deserves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 12 2016, @12:56PM
Can you scrape BBC news? That's where I get most stories from for submission to Soylent.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 12 2016, @05:10PM
The Register often has a story before anyone else.
scrape BBC
Roy Schestowitz and his band of smart helpers over at TechRights regularly bust BBC for being a blatantly M$-friendly and FOSS-hostile environment.
...as well as GCHQ-|NSA-friendly.
IMO, BBC is only useful for tech news if you like your stuff biased toward the closed-source/proprietary sector and only useful for security news if you like that biased in favor of oppressive Imperialist regimes (USA/UK/AU).
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Saturday August 13 2016, @06:01PM
We do scrape BBC RSS feeds. For example: " rel="url2html-23139">https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=16/08/11/135225
Now, finding a BBC story that is current, unbiased, and accurate is slightly can be more difficult.
Sorry about the formatting on the link - that is something it has only recently started doing, and it is the first time that I have noted it...
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.