How I got tech support scammers infected with Locky | Hacker News Reader

How I got tech support scammers infected with Locky

blog.kwiatkowski.fr

118 pointssemanser17 comments

Hey everyone, blog owner here. It's hosted in my cupboard and the HN/Reddit traffic is killing my bandwidth :) Here are some alternate links if the site is down:

https://archive.is/NRcnQ https://i.imgur.com/NR6pvkn.png http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...

I use "cupboard hosting" too, but behind cloudflare free tier with aggressive caching.

I do not condone of Cloudflare and their way of making life impossible for Tor users.

Consider running Varnish on a Digital Ocean node, pointing at your cupboard origin.

That's a great suggestion. I'll definitely set this up.

I suggested a free caching solution specifically because you are using "cupboard hosting". This usually means you're trying to keep costs as low as possible.

You can whitelist TOR users on cloudflare by setting up a rule for it, it's quite easy to do.

Of course, you're free to choose not to support them/use their product as the default behaviour is to aggressively shove captchas ato TOR users.

I'd love to see a traffic graph of your cupboard to know what an HN Slashdot effect looks like in Mbps/pps.

I'll be writing another blog article about this in a few days. I'm installing Splunk at the moment to see the metrics myself!

While I personally agree with your actions, I do wonder if it really is ethical to hack them back. Anyway, thanks, the more awareness of this BS, the better.

He just prevented a few people from being scammed, at least for some time. Sounds pretty ethical to me :-)

I am interested in what the ethical argument against hacking them back is, unless it is simply 'hacking someone is on the list of things that are bad.' My attitude is basically one of 'implicit consent' - if you have done something bad, you have given implicit consent for something similar to be done to you. I like the symmetry, as it simplifies the argument, just as the Golden Rule does.

Ethical argument against it: these companies are deeply unethical actors. The necessary and sufficient condition for their existence is their ability to take advantage of the gullible. But there is not and never will be the ability to swamp the gullibles' time with the time of highly paid professionals volunteering to troll. So it's really just a petty attempt to score internet points while not improving anything and selling/promoting an assumed moral high ground. I'm pretty sure that a majority of these moral attempts at trollsling end up being posted as a blog post, which itself is indicative of the real motivation.

One might compare it to a school encouraging an environment where a heinous bully can do something really bad, and then an internet mob retaliates by making the bully's life a living hell. Yeah, you're hurting someone bad, but don't pretend it's motivated by trying to improve the world.

I think intent is irrelevant here. I did it in the spur of the moment, because it was funny and because in my eyes they deserve it - it's not like it was a premeditated attempt in the hopes of writing a blog post.

In any case, I think acts are best judged based on their impact of the world, and not on random people's understanding of why they were performed. Here, we have (possibly) one less scammer on the job today, and more importantly, maybe a dozen or so new people who thought this was a good idea and will in turn try to make scammers' lives harder.

So what if there'll never be enough people to totally wreck their business model? I think the world is a little bit better now, and that's good enough for me. Even if I had done it all just for a minute of fame, I don't think that would matter and/or change any of this.

I don't think it was done to score points, but it would not bother me at all if it were: no harm was done, and in fact there was some benefit.

You also seem to be suggesting that if this counterattack could eliminate the scamming, it would be ethical, but as it cannot, then it is not. If the counterattack caused collateral damage, I could agree, but in this case, it did not.

The bully analogy strikes me as something of a straw man: it is not equivalent. More than that, I don't think it helps to discuss the issue here by comparing it to a situation that has its moral ambiguities: it is less likely to be confusing, I think, to stick to the specific facts of the case at hand.

While I personally agree with your actions, I do wonder if it really is ethical to hack them back.

In all probability, his hack was a mere annoyance to them, nothing more. I assume the scammers use company computers in a shared location (e.g. he could hear relevant discussions in the background).

So if one of the scammer's computers is locked by ransomware, a clean install of Windows puts them back in business.

mirror, anyone?

http://archive.is/NRcnQ

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