Hope in the fight against net gangsters
The online world has more criminals than an episode of The Sopranos. But is there a way to make things safer?
Occasionally in the TV series The Sopranos, the mobster Tony Soprano's children are shown using a computer. Idly, I'd watch and wonder what they'd say if they got pharmaceutical spam (since trucking illicit pharma is one of their father's sidelines) or secured their machines against bank detail-stealing Trojan programs. If they did, would they say "Oh, it's Dad's guys again," with a sigh?
If Meadow Soprano had a blog, would she need to fight off the comment spam? Or would they, like everyone else, struggle furiously against the onslaught on their inbox and comments section?
What we take to be the nice, safe internet actually makes the world that Tony Soprano in particular inhabits look a bit tame. In his world, don't forget, everyone is on the take from someone else, cadging a "point" - a percentage of profit - from people, loaning money with weekly interest rates (the "vig") that credit card companies would hesitate to charge per month. People get killed with frightening regularity, and the threat of death is always there.
OK, so nobody ever got killed by receiving spam email, but you still can't relax when you're online. If you're using Windows, it's increasingly hard to be sure that any page you're visiting isn't loaded with some sort of malware that wants to insinuate itself onto your machine: the Bank of India's webpage and the still-ongoing Storm worm and, oh, downloads of things that pretend just to be new Messenger "smileys".
Even computers in California's Marin County are, as Alex Eckelberry of Sunbelt Software puts it, "hacked up the ying-yang" so that it's serving pornography. (Don't all rush off, now.)
Spam, meanwhile, is generated in colossal amounts. And as for comment spam? Drop by Akismet, which provides comment spam protection for a growing number of blogs: its statistics page, which goes back less than two years, shows that comment spam has grown so that it's now 97% of all the comments arriving on Akismet-protected blogs. Postini, meanwhile, says 84% of all email it sees is spam. How do you stop that?
Shutting off, or repairing, all the millions of infected Windows PCs would be a really good start. The trouble is that the people using those machines are often not aware that anything's wrong.
The idea of creating a virus that would get rid of the viruses and other things has been tried before - that was the Welchia (or Nachia) worm, intended to beat the Blaster worm by forcing the installation of patches. Unfortunately, the author(s) did a less good job than the Blaster worm's writer, creating excessive internet traffic. It was a good idea ruined by bad execution - which meant that the antivirus companies issued a patch to get rid of Welchia as well.
Of course, you can see that the online security companies might not have liked the idea of a free worm that would fix systems. It would threaten a lot of their business – although, even if every Windows PC were magically updated to include all the latest security patches, there would still be a thriving security software business because people would keep on clicking infected attachments and going to phishing sites.
Even so, if I were able to pose a single question to the smartest person at Microsoft, it would be this: can you think of a way to get back all the machines running Windows that have been conquered by people using them to send spam and carry out attacks?
That would cut the amount of general online problems in half, if not more, at a stroke. And it would leave the bad guys where they should be, as they are in real life: a minority who are only just holding it together by their fear of having to go legit.
It would be like things should be, as illustrated by probably my favourite scene from the whole of the Sopranos, in which two hoods go into a newly opened coffee shop and tell the manager that it would be a shame if anything, you know, happened to it. Or him.
"Guys," the manager replies, "You can threaten me all you want, but every last bean is in the computer, and they can see everything in head office. If I take anything out for you, I'm gone and another guy comes in and it's the same story." Damage to the store? Head office won't care.
The hoods exit empty-handed. As they stand outside, one spits: "It's over for the little guy!"
Well, we can hope. Anyone working on that anti-worm worm?
Charles Arthur
Friday September 14 2007
Guardian Unlimited
© Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
The online world has more criminals than an episode of The Sopranos. But is there a way to make things safer?
Occasionally in the TV series The Sopranos, the mobster Tony Soprano's children are shown using a computer. Idly, I'd watch and wonder what they'd say if they got pharmaceutical spam (since trucking illicit pharma is one of their father's sidelines) or secured their machines against bank detail-stealing Trojan programs. If they did, would they say "Oh, it's Dad's guys again," with a sigh?
If Meadow Soprano had a blog, would she need to fight off the comment spam? Or would they, like everyone else, struggle furiously against the onslaught on their inbox and comments section?
What we take to be the nice, safe internet actually makes the world that Tony Soprano in particular inhabits look a bit tame. In his world, don't forget, everyone is on the take from someone else, cadging a "point" - a percentage of profit - from people, loaning money with weekly interest rates (the "vig") that credit card companies would hesitate to charge per month. People get killed with frightening regularity, and the threat of death is always there.
OK, so nobody ever got killed by receiving spam email, but you still can't relax when you're online. If you're using Windows, it's increasingly hard to be sure that any page you're visiting isn't loaded with some sort of malware that wants to insinuate itself onto your machine: the Bank of India's webpage and the still-ongoing Storm worm and, oh, downloads of things that pretend just to be new Messenger "smileys".
Even computers in California's Marin County are, as Alex Eckelberry of Sunbelt Software puts it, "hacked up the ying-yang" so that it's serving pornography. (Don't all rush off, now.)
Spam, meanwhile, is generated in colossal amounts. And as for comment spam? Drop by Akismet, which provides comment spam protection for a growing number of blogs: its statistics page, which goes back less than two years, shows that comment spam has grown so that it's now 97% of all the comments arriving on Akismet-protected blogs. Postini, meanwhile, says 84% of all email it sees is spam. How do you stop that?
Shutting off, or repairing, all the millions of infected Windows PCs would be a really good start. The trouble is that the people using those machines are often not aware that anything's wrong.
The idea of creating a virus that would get rid of the viruses and other things has been tried before - that was the Welchia (or Nachia) worm, intended to beat the Blaster worm by forcing the installation of patches. Unfortunately, the author(s) did a less good job than the Blaster worm's writer, creating excessive internet traffic. It was a good idea ruined by bad execution - which meant that the antivirus companies issued a patch to get rid of Welchia as well.
Of course, you can see that the online security companies might not have liked the idea of a free worm that would fix systems. It would threaten a lot of their business – although, even if every Windows PC were magically updated to include all the latest security patches, there would still be a thriving security software business because people would keep on clicking infected attachments and going to phishing sites.
Even so, if I were able to pose a single question to the smartest person at Microsoft, it would be this: can you think of a way to get back all the machines running Windows that have been conquered by people using them to send spam and carry out attacks?
That would cut the amount of general online problems in half, if not more, at a stroke. And it would leave the bad guys where they should be, as they are in real life: a minority who are only just holding it together by their fear of having to go legit.
It would be like things should be, as illustrated by probably my favourite scene from the whole of the Sopranos, in which two hoods go into a newly opened coffee shop and tell the manager that it would be a shame if anything, you know, happened to it. Or him.
"Guys," the manager replies, "You can threaten me all you want, but every last bean is in the computer, and they can see everything in head office. If I take anything out for you, I'm gone and another guy comes in and it's the same story." Damage to the store? Head office won't care.
The hoods exit empty-handed. As they stand outside, one spits: "It's over for the little guy!"
Well, we can hope. Anyone working on that anti-worm worm?
Charles Arthur
Friday September 14 2007
Guardian Unlimited
© Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
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