Archive: Feb 2014

That Awesome Time I Was Sued for Two Billion Dollars 4: Who Is the Eccentric Plaintiff?

Jason Scott now provides some background details on the guy who attempted suing him for distributing his book online, and moves on with the legal story. So, who the hell is this moonbat? Because at this point, you’re like: “Dude, that’s nuts!” And really, honestly that’s kind of my take on...

That Awesome Time I Was Sued for Two Billion Dollars 3: Weird Legal Threats Through Mail Drops

BBS archivist Jason Scott elaborates on the contents of the insane legal notices he was receiving from the Paul Andrew Mitchell guy for a few years since 1998. At the time that he started to write these letters to me, at one point he indicated that the Lenham Act permits triple damages (see right-hand...

That Awesome Time I Was Sued for Two Billion Dollars 2: Trademark and Intellectual Property Claims

Jason Scott’s presentation continues with highlights of some trademark issues he ran into, and the description of the most unusual intellectual property case. It turns out that the BARDEX, which is a trademark of C.R. Bard, is only to be used as urological catheter. It is not to be used in enemas (see...

That Awesome Time I Was Sued for Two Billion Dollars: Jason Scott’s Extraordinary Experience

Jason Scott, creator of textfiles.com, tells some hilarious stories about ins and outs of the old BBS files archiving activity during a Defcon presentation. Since the beginning part is kind of introducing myself and everything else, I am going to go move forward with that. My name is Jason Scott –...

How My Botnet Defeated the Russian Hackers 3: Beating a Competing Bot

As Michael’s bot started getting less successful, there occurred a need for improvement so that it could outperform a competing one made by Russian hackers. Everything worked great for about six months, and then all of a sudden things weren’t as rosy anymore. The client would call and he would say:...

How My Botnet Defeated the Russian Hackers 2: The Car-Purchasing Bot

Michael Schrenk now dwells on the actual bot design that enabled his client to outperform competitors in terms of buying the best used cars online. So, a car dealer came to me; he had a great opportunity, found a wonderful website that was part of the national franchise. They were getting in used rental...

How My Botnet Defeated the Russian Hackers: Screwing with the System

In a Defcon presentation, professional web bot developer Michael Schrenk tells an absorbing story of creating a specific botnet to gain competitive advantage. I’ve had the opportunity to do a lot of really cool things in my career with bots, but the one thing that gave me more satisfaction than anything...

Common Darknet Weaknesses 7: General Mitigations and Summary

At the end of his AIDE Conference presentation, Adrian Crenshaw describes a few more types of darknet attacks and enumerates a number of general takeaways. Also, things can be done to affect timing (see right-hand image). This is where sybil attacks can help augment traffic correlation attacks. Let’s say...

Common Darknet Weaknesses 6: Sybil and Traffic Analysis Attacks

Adrian Crenshaw now highlights a few more darknet attack vectors based on the use of sockpuppets as well as analyzing traffic and lists mitigations for these. Okay, now we’ll get into some more academic attacks – sybil attacks (see right-hand image). The term comes from the book called Sybil which about...