Cyber Shockwave We Were Warned- CNN Special

[runningman]

Did anyone watch this rubbish?

[YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NTNJcJM-UM&feature=PlayList&p=F6D06CBE1B271DE2&index=0[/YOUTUBE]

A guy in his basement does not have the capability to bring planes down and stop trains. This is ridiculous.

I told you the Internet is next.

[res0nat0r]

Re: Cyber Shockwave We Were Warned- CNN Special

Nice little bit of a scare piece by CNN but the tech they were talking about was totally correct and has already happened and happens still today.

Not sure where you got anything about a hacker in his basement controlling the world and causing mass transit casualties, that sounds the most nefarious, but that wasn't mentioned at all. The talk about a cellphone botnet is totally plausible and has happened already on PC's by things like the ILOVEYOU worm, which emailed itself to every user in the vitcims Outlook address book.

There was a bit of a hack a while back on a (relatively small) number of peoples iPhones. Only the people who jailbroke their phones were susceptible, but the ones stupid enough to do that and also leave their ssh server on their phone open with the default password were able to be remotely accessed and taken over, etc.

Botnets and malware which lead to identify theft really are the biggest risks to normal users on the internet right now because they are becoming so sophisticated.

The Conficker botnet is still running and out there and currently unable to be shut down, it apparently has almost 10 million(!) hosts under its owners control and is sending apparently about 10 billion(!) spam emails a day. This is very sophisticaed and interesting stuff.

Here is an overview of how it works:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conficker

And a (extremely technical) write up:

http://mtc.sri.com/Conficker/