You’ll never guess where Russian spies are hiding their control servers

arstechnica.com

44 points·shawndumas··7 comments

For those who hate clickbait titles:

""" a recently discovered backdoor Trojan used comments posted to Britney Spears's official Instagram account to locate the control server that sends instructions and offloads stolen data to and from infected computers. """

I did a double take when I read the title. For a moment, I thought it must be parody.

When the actual content is already quite intriguing, an over the top clickbaitification like this becomes nausea inducing.

This article is actually pretty incredible.

This is a systemic problem in computing. Knowing what is contained in the code running on your machine. What's the solution? Is there one? Force all users to compile all code before running?

And does that even really solve it?

How about medicine? Force patients to compound it themselves?

(And just wait for the intersection, smart medicine, when the NSA inserts nanobots into tylenol to better spy on the population. I don't think that would be too far fetched after the technology gets sufficiently advanced).

Might this explain what's going on with the US presidential Twitter feed?

covfefe?

Although this is certainly a clever method of obfuscation, the most shocking thing in this article is that Britney Spears has an active instagram

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