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Comment by rozab | Hacker News Reader

>Padding it out with racist slurs told me all I needed to know about its creator.

Clearly that is the intent. These companies have no shame. Remember Sony's response to their rootkit being discovered? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_roo...

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I’m not seeing the connection between Sony and racial slurs. In fact, especially without knowing what racial slur this is, it tells me very little about the creators intent.

They are saying the slurs could be intended to throw you off of the corporate scent and should be discarded as any evidence one way or the other who commissioned the creation.

It seems like most people are saying that all evidence found and all evidence not found should be interpreted to prove Sony or the MPAA or whoever is responsible. Evidence they didn't is fake and proof they did. Absence of evidence is proof of a coverup.

Sounds like your typical conspiracy theory.

That isn't the claim. The claim is the inclusion of a racial slur doesn't tell us anything. Instinctively, when I read it, I thought, "Oh, this is written by a independent vigilante, not by stakeholder".

But other commenters are right. It is compatible with being written by an independent vigilante, and it is compatible with being written by or on behalf of stakeholders.

I will withhold conclusion until further evidence is tendered.

The point is Sony continued to deny the existence of the rootkit for years, despite overwhelming evidence. If this malware was commissioned by the MPAA or something, I think they would have no issue with telling whatever morally dubious firm they hired to make it look like it came from stereotypical hacker types. They know that security blogs love to make conclusions on the origins of malware based on strings that could be trivially obscured.

> These companies have no shame.

Do you think this was backed by companies? It seems reasonable to suspect it, but it’s a issue radioactive now so won’t be easy to find out.

I think it was commissioned by a company and written by a teen or twentysomething jerk. Raising hackles by throwing N-words around is a favorite pastime of young assholes. Don't think that because 4chan cracked down on that sort of thing that it doesn't still go on in certain communities.

4chan might've cracked down on the racism, like, a decade ago, in the moot era. Have you been there lately? /pol/ took over and basically homogenized every board.

If 4chan cracked down on racism they did the worst job I could possibly imagine. You can’t even go to the fit or tv boards without running into literal, unapologetic, white supremacist views.

8chan if I recall formed because 4chan did away with /pol/ way way back for being too toxic to the rest of the site (it's meant to contain the scum, not breed it). 4chan eventually re-added /pol/, and 8chan, well, you know the rest there.

If it was backed by companies, it would probably be funded by a 'trade group' funded by the companies, to have three layers of indirection to protect themselves.

The fraud on the FCC's public comment process is an object lesson. The fraud itself (fake FCC comments under false and stolen identities) was committed by social media consultants with names like "Fluent"*, "Opt-Intelligence", and "React2Media". They were in turn hired by the trade group "Broadband for America", with contractual language that keeps BfA at arms length from the crimes. BfA in turn is a separate entity from the large ISP's that fund and direct it -- the biggest ones being Comcast, Charter, and AT&T. Two levels of indirection.

*(Unrelated to the CFD software, obviously)

This was the stuff the New York AG investigation unraveled:

https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2021/attorney-general-james-...

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/biggest-isps-pai...

(From Ars: "With broadband companies having used third-party vendors to conduct the campaign, the AG said it found no evidence that ISPs themselves "had direct knowledge" of the fraudulent behavior.")

>Do you think this was backed by companies?

Frankly I'd be shocked if it wasn't.

There are all kinds of crazy people out there. There could easily be somebody with a burning desire to fight IP piracy.

Indeed. The MPAA and RIAA spring to mind.

>There could easily be somebody with a burning desire to fight IP piracy.

It could be some kind of Robinhood vigilante figure, but that's a hard sell for me given the already-known abusive history and tactics of the game industry.

Here's another hard sell : it's the TPB people releasing it in an effort to reduce their hosting costs. (It's not, but since we're throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks, why not?)

Many of these video game groups write root-kit style DRM mechanisms for a living; given the (shady) history & experience at the task, it's not a far leap to assume that one of these groups would irresponsibly combine the efforts, if given enough legal ambiguity and a long enough paper-trail to make legal harassment separated from the major group.

Personal anecdote : it's often talked about within game-cheating circles that mega-game groups actually take part in the ownership and funding of groups that sell third-party 'cheating' software. This new virus-writing behavior wouldn't surprise me in the least.

>Many of these video game groups write root-kit style DRM mechanisms for a living; given the (shady) history & experience at the task, it's not a far leap to assume that one of these groups would irresponsibly combine the efforts, if given enough legal ambiguity and a long enough paper-trail to make legal harassment separated from the major group.

from the sound of the article, the malware sounds extremely unsophisticated, though. It edits your hostname, sends your ip and what you downloaded to some php script, and that's it. it doesn't even persistently install itself in any way. Basically anyone could put something like this together without much skill required. Not even disputing this wouldn't come from some sort of ip-based adjacent company, but I doubt it would be written by the same people who write DRM software

Software piracy is not a socially significant issue, it's not even divisive. It's illegal, but nobody cares about it, so you can't imagine getting any kind of white knight award if you fight against it. Well I'm sure there are people who care about the welfare of Hollywood or Redmond executives, but they tend to be Hollywood or Redmond executives.

>told me all I needed to know about its creator

On the contrary, it makes one curious. Is it an attempt to ensnare the victim into heightened surveillance and suspicion (and hence higher likelihood of coming to harm) from governments, based on the assumption that their own malware uses these keywords to scan for targets? Or perhaps it creates some other kind of liability for the victim.

Perhaps an attempt at connecting anti piracy with racism?

It seems very strange.

Isn't that reaching for four dimensional chess? Does anyone actually play four dimensional chess?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

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