Paperghost Postbag - Random Answers for Random Questions

Postbag? Answers:

Derrill: What kind of monster are you that you can repeatedly pummel pretty girls?

The worst kind. However, I'm an equal opportunities beater-upper too. Look at the bald guy die! Woo-hoo!!

Dintz: Gimme a day in the life of pg please

Er, there's no real way to answer this without it turning into a boring list an nobody likes those, right? Suffice to say, there's a bunch of computers doing a bunch of stuff and then I wake up and start fiddling with them to an insane degree. In addition, there's machines that run online games day in and day out, so people can report nasty hacker people ingame. Finally, there's around 700 to 1000 emails every day that need sifting through. Out of those, only about 30 to 40 are things about inflating body parts or buying pills. If my email goes down for just one day, there's Hell to pay catching up. You don't want me to find your latest screwy install on that day, I can tell you.

Sure, it doesn't sound exciting but wait till it all starts kicking off. Then it's fists flying and guns blazing. Sort of.

Zec: Hey Paperghost, I have a question for your postbag: What is your favourite radio station, what do you listen to the most on the airwaves?

Awesome, we might get through this without a single security question! Um, I don't really listen to the radio - however, you CAN get a slice of PG Pie here. In addition to that, let's go all Web 3.6 or whatever and slot in a tasty Music Burger (based on my most-listened-to-albums) for your viewing pleasure:

Derrill: a) When are you going to make some musical/malware fusion performance piece? b) What's the best music for cleaning your mother's PC of donkey-related porn-based malware? If you're going to answer Mahler, you'll have to come up with a better reason than "because he's the best".

a) Who said I'm not, muahaha and all that. You never know what crazy piece of nonsense is going to appear here.... ;)

b) Well, if you happen to be Oasis, Stone Roses, RATM, Johnny Cash, Nelly Furtado or Public Enemy I'll probably buy you a pint. Well, apart from Johnny Cash cos' he's dead. And Nelly Furtado, because I can't really see her slamming down a can of Tennant's Super.

You never know, though. At any rate, I find they're the best things to listen to when doing Malware related stuff with PCs.

Darren J McCabe a.k.a. KiD: Why are ISP's not being forced to pay penalties for hosting bot software? Why are they not forced by an international law to kill off any sites that are identified as spreading this scourge on the t'internet?

The short answer is, no one really cares enough to go after the ISPs at this point because they're all excited over wonderful "legislation" regarding Spy/Adware that no-one outside the US will care about, much less be affected by. Let them have their Spyware fun, and they'll come back soon enough. As for the ISPs themselves, it only seems to be a problem for them when the bots are costing them money.

Got a customer spewing spam on unlimited bandwidth per month? Meh, who cares.

Did they dare go over their 5 Gig limit for the second month running? Quick, fix it! Wall them off! Now!

Shadowserver have a Hall of Fame, which is nice. But what we REALLY need is a Hall of Shame. A blast of bad publicity works wonders.

LoPhat: whats your favourite website to write on and why?

..wow, these questions are random! Originally, I'd have said this one. However, now I have the luxury of being able to write on a whole pile of different sites and it's all geared around which site can do the most damage to whatever particular scam I happen to be looking at. Lots of money involved? Revenews time. Crazy technical writeup? That'll be Spywareguide. Tons of angry ranting and stupid drawings of silly things? That'll be this one, then.

milligansghost: Right Apart from Matrix Online have you Used any of the Other 3D things out there like WOW ... i cant they give me a migraine :-(

....see! What did I say about random? Okay, here goes - I've never played World of Warcraft. In fact, I don't play many PC games at all apart from Matrix Online and Guild Wars. Mostly, it's console games all the way. Give me a big gun with a chainsaw strapped to it, point me in the direction of some seven foot mutants and then be amazed as I proceed to cut them all into pieces and dance upon their corpses.

Oh, random flashback. My Student Union sucked apart from the (at the time) genius idea of putting a Playstation 2 in a glass case and letting you play Tekken 3 all night (more fun than the watered down beer and ugly students, believe me).

One night? Man, I got on there and I totally BEAT ALL COMERS TO DEATH WITH FIFTY STRAIGHT WINS IN A ROW.

Sadly, this included one really hot chick who (I am reliably informed) I was supposed to let win.

Still, she didn't even get one hit in which is the main thing.

RichieB: Sharon Stone b'aint purdy. Kinda fit but not really what I'd call pretty. I mean, I would and all that, but then I've got no standards ;) I live in permanent "2:30am in the nightclub land" where, heck, even the female bouncers are fair game!

Is it just me, or is there a definite theme of videogames, student bars, bouncers and nightclubs this time round? Let's see what else we have in the Postbag this week....

Derrill: Everyone talks about how social engineering based attacks are on the rise ... what can be done about it, outside of educating blokes as don't want to be educated? One of my programmer buddies loves his poster: "Programming is a race between programmers to create more idiot-proof software and the universe to create bigger idiots." The topic of social engineering and saving them from that reminds me of this poster. Can anything be done?

Sort of. Ultimately you'll always have people who'll click whatever you put in front of them. To me, it's up to the Operating System Vendors out there to think of new and funky ways to combat social engineering and stick it in their OS. And I'm thinking of something a bit more advanced than a box that says "are you sure?" fifty times in a row before it lets you do anything.

Yeah, you can lock down the code. But what's the point if you're not also striving to lock down the people? Security tools can do their bit, as can education - but when your pleas are falling on deaf ears the only people who can provide that last line of defence are the people making the Operating Systems. So far, they've failed spectacularly. And yes, Microsoft, I'm looking at you.

...this concludes my random ramble of things and stuff! If I didn't nab your question this time, fear not because it will probably end up in the next batch. As a reward, do you like Batman? Yeah, sure you do. Enjoy.