Google Sues Glupteba botnet [pdf]
storage.googleapis.com
storage.googleapis.com
> Instead, when the botnet’s C2 server is interrupted, Glupteba malware is hard-coded to “search” the public Bitcoin blockchain for transactions involving three specific Bitcoin addresses that are controlled by the Glupteba Enterprise.
>From time to time, the Glupteba Enterprise executes transactions in those addresses, and as part of those transactions, the Glupteba Enterprise leaves in the blockchain the location of the domain for a back- up C2 Server.
Nice, the faster people start treating public blockchains as pay-to-write-once, read-for-free, databases and the native cryptocurrency more like fuel for writing, the quicker this “currency” debate ends for something more intelligent and aligned with reality and the market behaviors.
In before “they could have used a permissioned database”, I really can’t think of something more reliable and cheaper with assurances of availability like this
Write the messages onchain to an address your users know, or with a signed message your users know to look for
> Write the messages onchain to an address your users know
Ah yes, for those fans who are literally too lazy/disinterested to leave YouTube for long enough to tap your name into Google but are motivated enough to grep the blockchain.
Deplatforming has never stopped fans from finding content.
Assurances that they only need because they're breaking the law. It is well established that blockchains are good to facilitating illegal behavior. This is just a novel way of using them for that purpose
Platformless internet, whats what people mean by web3 and I’m here for it
A public utility that can just be optionally used no matter what people think of you
edit, ok, tor appeared with web2.0, but still it is more of a web 1.3.
ISPs can deplatform
ICANN and ENOM can deplatform
Nations can force them to deplatform and effectively censor
your web 1.0 server can be unreachable or unable to serve data
a TOR onion service is subject to the same distributed denial of service
Reading from a blockchain is not, and the costs for writing to it are one-off and low
Unlike web3, where they platforms chose to write custom metadata to the blockchain and interpret as they so chose... Oh wait.
there likely will be a day where there is nobody left who knows how to use dominant blockchains and rely on a few company controlled platforms to do everything for them, so there is nobody left to communicate with when using the public utilities in the most raw form.
For now, that's not the case and education is expanding. Not as fast as the uneducated users of blockchains, but some of them dive deeper too.
Even now this is the case. It's a bit more spread because many people jump on the bandwagon and try to maximize their scams^W profits.
But then you get news like "Peter Molyneux releasing next game on Gala Games platform", and this is exactly what I'm talking about.
It doesn't matter how many users and devs you "educate". If Platform X doesn't recognize Platform Y's metadata, no amount of blockchain will help you.
What if a corrupted government was also blocking access to freedom of speech and querying some harder-to-block public, immutable database on a blockchain was effectively circumventing this block?
Yeah, it's technically still breaking the law and it could be blocked too (albeit much harder), though it's for a good cause.
It's magnitudes more expensive to keep putting them up than to take them down.
This reads a bit like when, as a child, we'd discuss who would win in a fight, Goku or Superman.
I doubt bitcoin 'billionaires' would put more up, because liquidating that much bitcoin would crash their market (considering >70% of trades on exchanges are wash trades) and require them to go against tragedy of the commons.
You've either missed the point or are intentionally ignoring the context, because "China did something" is actually "China successfully shut down bitcoin mining inside it's borders and has the capabilities to shut down these satellites if it chose to do so".
That's not debating super heroes or even saying other countries will do it. If China saw these as a problem, they will likely deal with them.
Let's say (company names are just examples, I don't necessarily think those particular companies will do it) government-controlled ISPs blocked access to the core protocol. Google (over SSL + Secure /Encrypted DNS) might provide a gateway. GitHub can. Microsoft can. Apple can. AWS can. Facebook can. What can the government do then? Blocking those is effectively blocking the whole Internet. Eventually governments will realize that it can't be practically blocked.
One of those things seem more likely than the other.
They will eventually have to embrace it, or collapse economically.
there's a reason why Orwell said a boot stamping a human face forever instead of a boot stamping a human face until it became economically disadvantageous to do so.
More constellations are underway: https://observer.com/2021/11/boeing-astra-space-startups-eye...
Starlink transforms the internet more than people realize
Then they are left with chasing anyone who has any radio equipment outside the cities.
That's incredible potential! I better get in now and shill a bit on HN to convince people that it's a good investment so that the price goes up.
> Assurances that they only need because they're breaking the law. It is well established that blockchains are good to facilitating illegal behavior. This is just a novel way of using them for that purpose
I don't think that describing the mechanisms as facilitating illegal behavior is entirely fair. A better term would be something like "extralegal", which includes illegal behavior as a significant subcategory.
This isn't just sophistry. A significant fraction of the world's population live in places where "rule of law" is at best a polite fiction, or where the legal system is largely captured by a kleptocratic oligarchy[0].
It would be nice if trustless distributed ledgers were actually being used to do things like establish property rights and facilitate transactions in places that don't have, for example, a functioning land registry or the equivalent, or at least be shown to be useful to bootstrap that sort of thing into existence (collectible NFTs and virtual real estate are only baby steps in that direction), but it is true that the 'good' edge cases of establishing immutable ground truths that cannot be erased by fiat/regime change/interregnum are legitimate though largely theoretical[1].
Meanwhile, we're left with the definition of "facilitating behaviors that a court can be convinced to disallow, which are mostly, though not entirely, behaviors that are (and most citizens would agree should be) illegal". I can't think of a better concise term than "extralegal" to capture that nuance.
[0] I personally don't subscribe to the belief that this describes most of the industrialized world, whatever some cryptocurrency boosters think, but that's a political matter. Everybody draws the line somewhere, and agrees that some chunks of the world exist on the other side of it.
[1] Cryptocurrencies can also facilitate otherwise legal transactions that are being hindered by extralegal means, such as donations to WikiLeaks during the global payment processor blockade (December 2010 to July 2012).
You could also either create nonstandard clients for the bittorrent DHT, that just use it to find each other, or maybe just have a torrent of a list of domains that you prepared beforehand, but you only provide the next chunk of data with the next items in the list once your old ones are burned.
So we would be using DNS as the distributed storage, its in the name lol
And there are also snapshots of whois record states all over the place if the records change or are hijacked. But this makes it hard to get new ones if the records cannot be updated and theyre all hijacked
Writes to a blockchain are still some benefits like simply not being a domain name.
This is genius.
Perhaps it's not as life altering as jail or fines, but still: no holidays in Florida or Hawaii. No meeting peers at a congres in the US. Not even using flights from American carriers to go to South America, as they will likely pass via a US hub.
Worse. If they ignore the whole thing, at some point they will get condemned of contempt of court. That's a criminal offense. That means you can try and get interpol involved. Once you have an interpol Red Notice to your name, international travel to any civilized country becomes complicated.
Look at the risks involved in having central banks as the final counterparty for all our government's fiat monies: [0]. This is why increasingly companies, banks, pension and insurance funds, and governments are turning to it a a pristine global digital collateral with no counterparty risk.
“The key question facing Bitcoin nearing the onset of 2022 is whether it’s peaking or simply a consolidating bull market,” wrote a recent Blomberg Intelligence report[1]. “We believe it’s the latter, and see the benchmark crypto well on its way to becoming global digital collateral in a world going that way.”
[0] Consider the multiple hyperinflation disasters of the 20th century, I.e., the century of central banks. https://wtfhappenedin1971home.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/do...
[1] https://assets.bbhub.io/professional/sites/10/1489771_Crypto...
This is quite irrelevant to the vast majority of Earth's population. I know some Americans consider the US to be the center of the world, but I doubt that sentiment is prevalent in Russia of all places.
> Perhaps it's not as life altering as jail or fines, but still: no holidays in Florida or Hawaii. No meeting peers at a congres in the US. Not even using flights from American carriers to go to South America, as they will likely pass via a US hub.
This is both telling, and curious. The kind of mental model of the world required to foster this as a concern for most people, is interesting.
https://kingcharles.one/google-v-dmitry-starovikov-1-2021cv1...
(and as an exercise in why PACER sucks so much, I had to pay twice to download them all because even though I opened all the PDFs in my browser my session timed out and when I hit download I just got an error and not the PDF)
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/google-disrup...
I don't see the legal aspect going anywhere. I don't know the technicalities of suing someone in another country, but to get the discovery they need they'll need subpoenas. How do you serve a subpoena in Russia? Is there any treaty which gives a U.S. subpoena any legal power in Russia? I guess there must be something behind it or Google would not have wasted their legal resources to file it.
https://kingcharles.one/google-v-dmitry-starovikov-1-2021cv1...
If you can figure out how to push them into RECAP please do so.
This is how courts in the USA turn civil matters into criminal matters all the time. For instance, non-payment of child support: you can't legally be imprisoned for your debts, but if you fail to pay after the judge orders you to pay then you are in contempt and you are going to jail.
I don't know which jurisdiction you're referring to, but certainly in Illinois state courts it's an unlimited offense. I don't think there are any statutory restraints on it. I've seen people be sentenced to 20 years for refusing to testify as the sole witness to a murder.
Google LLC v. Dmitry Starovikov, et al.
1:2021cv10260
New York Southern District Court
12/02/2021
They served the defendants already via FedEx. What weight that will carry I don't know. The court might enter a default judgment in a few weeks when the defendants fail to appear.
First, with respect to Thursday’s hearing, in light of Defendants’ failure to oppose Google’s motion, Google intends to rely on the declarations of Shane Huntley and Elizabeth Bisbee, which fully support the proposed Preliminary Injunction. Should the Court prefer to receive live testimony from one or both of Google’s declarants, Google respectfully requests that they be permitted to appear virtually, as each would be required to travel from out of state (from the West Coast, in Mr. Huntley’s case) to appear in person. Second, as anticipated, following the disruption efforts pursuant to the TRO, Defendants have attempted to reconstitute the botnet by using the Bitcoin blockchain to direct the infected devices to new command-and-control (“C2”) servers and migrated the storefronts used in service of the Enterprise to new name servers. See ECF 5 (Compl.) ¶¶ 47-50, 54-65. Google’s disruption efforts already have identified several new C2 servers, and Google is working with the relevant web-hosting providers to disable them. Case 1:21-cv-10260-DLC Document 14 Filed 12/14/21 Page 1 of 2 December 14, 2021 Page 2 While the TRO provides that Google may move to modify the Order in the event it identifies new domains, see ECF 8 (TRO) at 11 16, Defendants are generating new domains nearly every day in an effort to evade the TRO. Rather than submit repeated requests to the Court to add new domains and IP addresses as they are identified, Google respectfully requests broader injunctive language to cover, for example, any C2 servers identified in blockchain transactions initiated by Defendants and/or the Enterprise, any domains used to host storefronts used in connection with Defendants’ criminal schemes, and any domains identified by Google as hardcoded in the malware or otherwise used to distribute the malware. A proposed Preliminary Injunction Order is attached at Exhibit 1. Finally, the TRO provides that “Google shall post bond in the amount of $75,000 to be paid into the Court registry.” ECF 8 (TRO) at 16. The Clerk has requested that Google instead submit the required bond to the Clerk and seek a modified order directing the Clerk to accept the bond. Accordingly, to accommodate the Clerk’s request, Google respectfully requests that the Court so-order that Google’s submission of the $75,000 to the Clerk satisfies the TRO’s bond requirement. Google’s Proposed Order at Exhibit 1 incorporates this modification.
Of course if you're to stay anonymous then you obviously have better chances to stay off radar in Russia than in US, but again that's only work until someone bribe local authorities to find you.
Charged with treason for aiding foreign intelligence agencies, odds are he was working with the FBI and is guilty as charged.
Group-IB was kind of famous for causing problems, it’s surprising it took as long as it did for the government to crack down.
The only "The Untouchable Russian Hackers" who exist are ones who officially work for government, but they are not any different than NSA.
https://blog.google/threat-analysis-group/disrupting-glupteb...
Pages 30-32 describe the command and control server update mechanism using blockchain.
What year is this from ?
Doesn't google offer 15 gigs of free storage. Also how is "two full gigabytes" industry leading ?