Hacker News Reader

Comment by zacinbusiness | Hacker News Reader

But wouldn't it be interesting if, in the dark of night, Brian Krebs actually was a serious cyber-crimnal. And he used his reputation and knowledge to frame himself from time to time, just to throw off the fuzz. He's certainly smart enough to pull it off. (no, I don't think that's true that he's a cyber-criminal :-) )

View on HN

the old school version of this conspiracy is the AV software makers were the ones funding the virus creators.

I heard a rumor back in the day that the Chernobyl virus [1] (Also Win.CIH, I think) was released by Microsoft within pirated versions of Windows. At the time I was in high school and just believed it, because Microsoft was the big, evil corporation at the time. Now of course I'm more skeptical, though I still wouldn't be surprised.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIH_(computer_virus)

Thanks for reminding me of that one.

Some bogus design decisions by Packard Bell (no jumper/switch to lock out BIOS flash access) meant two of my machines were written off.

No, they weren't running pirated Windows, though I was on day 204 of my 31 day Paint Shop Pro evaluation.

A friend of mine had a pbell that was killed off by Chernobyl. I was on the phone with him when he booted it up. "I'm going to boot." "Don't do it man." "Nah I'm gonna boot. Here it goes. See it's fine." "Sweet" "Uh oh" "Uh oh?" "Uh oh"

And that was the end of that machine lol

I managed to get replacement motherboards for both under warranty, including engineer call out.

You'd almost think the virus shipped with the computer, the way they responded.

Kind of like the religious nutcases being in cahoots with the heathens. Many conglomerates own both health food and junk food brands.

My personal conspiracy theory is that AV software are actually backdoors for the international three letter agencies. For my taste the market is unusually fractured with many of the players coming from the typical spy powernations. Plus it would be the sweetest access door as they are almost always whitelisted and get access to the internet regularly.

ha ! like the Dexter of the cyber world. I sense a tv series idea coming on..

I don't think there's a screenwriter in the world that knows how to do hacking and security stuff realistically.

The recent House of Cards (S02E03) is actually refreshingly good. There are a holes that pretty much have to exist for plot but overall they actually talk about real things. Not random gibberish.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/18/house-o...

I don't think that any sane screenwriter would want to do hacking and security stuff seriously if they could - the pacing/dynamics of how hacking is shown currently is much better fit to what works in movies as narrative media; showing it realistically simply would generally hurt the movie and be unappreciated by the vast majority of viewers.

It's just as with any other time-consuming thinking activities such as invention/tech research; crime/plot investigation; medical diagnosis - they're much more successful when the screenwriters/directors misrepresent reality of 'how it happens', so they do so intentionally.

That's how that media works - if you want realistic portrayal of hacking and security, then it (just as many, many other topics) is quite suitable for a written narrative, but not really for a two-hour movie/30min tvseries format.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com