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turning the tables on cyber criminals
#40893 06/13/16 10:35 AM
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jchuzi Offline OP
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Maybe this will work, maybe not, but it's an interesting development. A Computer Security Start-Up Turns the Tables on Hackers


Jon

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Re: turning the tables on cyber criminals
jchuzi #40897 06/13/16 01:38 PM
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Sounds worth trying, but I am confident that if it works it won't take the bad guys long to figure out a new approach to get around it.

Last edited by joemikeb; 06/14/16 12:33 AM.

If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein
Re: turning the tables on cyber criminals
joemikeb #40907 06/14/16 12:09 AM
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Re: turning the tables on cyber criminals
joemikeb #40911 06/14/16 11:57 AM
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Originally Posted By: joemikeb
Sounds worth trying, but I am confident that if it works it won't take the bad guys long to figure out a new approach to get around it.

This isn't a new war, it's been going on for several years.

Researchers have been using honeypots for quite some time, trying to capture malware and figure out its behavior, including tracing its interaction with the C&C servers that some use. For that they favor using virtual machines, that allow them to observe the malware. It's been so effective, the malware authors have already reacted to it by adding sophisticated "blue pill detection" routines, to see if they are actually running in a VM. If they successfully detect the VM, they don't activate. These started showing up a few years ago

So it turns into an escalating tech war. The hackers detect the blue pill. The blue pill gets upgraded, the hackers figure out how to detect it again, the pill gets updated again, etc etc.


I work for the Department of Redundancy Department
Re: turning the tables on cyber criminals
Virtual1 #40915 06/14/16 01:02 PM
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Cyber security is not a war! Wars have specific enemies, defined objectives, and eventually Is won or lost. After a war the survivors can pick up the pieces and go back to their old way of life -- sort of. Cyber security is more like fighting crime. The perpetrators are all around us and sometimes we are our own worst enemy (we get suckered in by scams, neglect security updates, fail to keep our guard up). There is no win or lose. The best we can do is to keep the level of the conflict at tolerable levels.


If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein

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