Microsoft goes bot herder hunting in streets of Russia Microsoft is taking its campaign against digital crime to the streets of Russia, placing ads in newspapers in Moscow and St. Petersburg in an attempt to track down the operators of the notorious Rustock spam botnet. The software giant in March delivered a devastating blow to Rustock that employed novel legal and technical …
>>Ads that name and shame known operators might be a good next step
Would that be like those "known enemy combatants" in Guantanamo Bay? Microsoft would look pretty silly on the wrong end of a defamation case, in a Russian court, against a "known" cyber-scammer against whom they have only indirect and circumstantial evidence.
Unless, of course, they play the Russians at their own game and overbid on the customary wheels-of-jurisprudence-oiling supplementary charge.
MS bashing at this? wouldn't you rather see two dead-beats fighting it out for mutual destruction than joining up to raid your house?
Don't like MS? then don't use their products, and come sit on the sideline cheering with the rest of us. Spammers prey on the clueless to abuse the weak and break down the strong. One less in the world is a Good Thing, no matter how it happens.
(my inbox now receives ~25,000, yes thousand, emails a month. 98% spam. It was around 35K when this lawsuit began. thank you MS. good second step, now please take step 3...)
........it has to be admitted that Win7 is significantly more robust than previous incarnations, Security Essentials is also a worthwhile contribution to the cause and it has become increasingly clear over the last to or three years that MS has been devoting a *lot* of employee resources and wonga on what we might call "judicial activism" against those tosspots. That this should have been the situation at least a decade ago I freely concede, however better late than never.
Problem is that I, like many others here, do not use their products, yet we get thousands of emails a week that we do not want and have to maintain complex spam filters to keep those 99% of emails out of our company networks because a bunch of retarded idiots use windows and get infected by Russian, Chinese, Indian or whatever crackware and are part of botnets. Blame Microsoft for their idiotic security, the windows lusers or whoever - fact is, the combination idiot + windows is doing a lot of harm.
As for Windows 7 being secure ... helll yeah - I need root priv's to use the program ping.exe, yet, it still got compromised by shortcut icons, ROFL. Windows 7 still has the svchost.exe crap; fsck -F /dev/head, anybody claiming that is anything near "secure" needs his brains checked - ok, I can get the sysinternals bullshit to check which exe or dll is behind it, but WTF?
I know what you are saying, but a poorly designed car driven with care is a lot safer than an excellent car driven dangerously.
People install firewalls to protect themselves and when they get a popup saying "FFG_TTY.exe is trying to access the Internet. Approve Y or N???" they will invariably hit Y just to get rid of the prompt and not be bothered again.
Most issues are caused by the bit in-between the chair back and the keyboard. Don't get me wrong, Windoze is crap, but it is not all M$ fault in that regard.
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