When I saw this on TV I was like LOLOMGWTF...W.T.F!?!?!
OK to summarise what happened:
The BBC purchased a live working 20,000+ strong Botnet for $2000, they then demonstrated its abilities buy spamming a Hotmail & Gmail account, then DDoS'ed PrevX test website (with permission), then set the users wallpaper to a custom wallpaper to inform the users they have been infected and then 'disabled' the botnet.
Now to me... this is slightly illegal... and stupid...
Now when have the BBC (or PrevX) been above the law? and when did they all of a sudden gain great knowledge about Malware etc and knew that what they were doing was having no ill effect on the uninformed victims?
If the consortium of companies such as FSecure, Microsoft, ICANN etc decide they can not do anything about the conficker botnet which grew to a size of estimated 10 million+, what the hell does the BBC think there doing? Some comments people said was "yes its a good thing the BBC disabled the Botnet"... WTF. Seriously. I would have no problem with Microsoft & Co disabling and removing conficker from my PC rather than the inexperienced BBC, but no, they decided not todo it because it would be illegal.
So firstly the BBC funded criminals (and potentially terrorism), they then flood 2 email accounts (I take it they didn't get permission from GMail or Hotmail before doing so) causing unnecessary load on the ISP & victims PC, then they DDoS'ed PrevX (I think this made PrevX looks really stupid and unprofessional) and whay happens if one of the victim pays there Internet by bandwidth? So they have potentially cost the victims money. Next they change the victims wallpaper which is again against the law.
My favourite quote is this:
"If this exercise had been done with criminal intent it would be breaking the law."
IT WAS BREAKING THE LAW, YOU ILLEGALLY ACCESSED PEOPLES COMPUTERS WITHOUT PERMISSION.
God damn it makes me rage writing this... The BBC gets away with it. Now if I demonstrated to one of my customers using the above methods, how long would it be until I had a call from the police?
Well shit next time I get a call from the popo I know what to say "If this exercise had been done with criminal intent it would be breaking the law."
2 comments:
i think they used uni computers or computers that they own or have permission to infect.
and yes i was also like wtf pwnt lol when i saw this.
tommy
@nocheze: In one part of the program they showed that they had computers from many difference countries. I don't think that they had permission from all the owners of the computers, let alone owned them. The fact that they informed them of their activity by changing the wallpaper signifies that the participants were unwilling.
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