Saturday, November 29, 2008

Creative minds, a pity they are evil

It's really worrisome to see the way the malware and spam business is evolving, but at the same time it's impressing to see they skills they use to defeat each measure taken against them.

Social engineering is being fabulously applied by this groups, they have distributed content making people think it was completely safe, using ingenous and intelligent ways.

But todas I bumped into a news story that made me laugh at the same time my mind raced behind the implications. There's now a little program for Windows that has a female stripper that undresses if we do what she asks.

She doesn't ask too much, only that we correctly write some quite deformed words that she shows us. If we write the correct word, she strips a little more and shows another scrambled word. This appears quite harmless, but this is just an appearance, under the hood things become more sinister.

The deformed words don't come from an internal list, they don't come from the site of the programmer. The deformed words are taken from thousands of websites that use that sort of control words to stop the spambots. So, every time someone writes one of this words, it's fed unto a spambot that was trying to connect to a site, so that it can pass this security measure and drop it's hated payload.

On one side, I really despise what spammers do, contaminating our lives. On the other hand, I salute them for the sheer creativity they showed to pass the captchas.

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