08.11.13
Gemini version available ♊︎Microsoft Windows is Defacing the World Wide Web and Raising Costs
Found circulating in JoinDiaspora
Summary: Everyone is paying the high price of a honeypot OS (with back doors for the NSA) being widely used
There appears to have been a sharp rise in SPAM recently (on numerous accounts, it’s not a coincidence). The vast amounts of it get spewed from Windows — the world’s leader in NSA back doors.
As long as there are back doors, this whole menace will persist and botnets made of Windows zombies [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8] will bombard the Web, causing damage to everyone’s life. Based on this article from the other day, there is a new Windows botnet and it is being used to damage Web sites:
There’s a new Windows-powered botnet, Fort Disco, slowly building up strength and cracking into PHP-based blog and content management system Web sites.
To quote one key part, “Matthew Bing, an Arbor Security Engineering & Response Team (ASERT) research analyst, wrote, “Arbor ASERT has been tracking a campaign we are calling Fort Disco which began in late May 2013 and is continuing. We’ve identified six related command-and-control (C&C) sites that control a botnet of over 25,000 infected Windows machines. To date, over 6,000 Joomla, WordPress, and Datalife Engine installations have been the victims of password guessing.””
Putting the vast amounts of SPAM I have been getting in my 22 accounts aside (this year it is far worse than ever before), I have been observing attempts to crack my CMS-powered pages and it is costing a lot in bandwidth (an additional twelve pounds or so per month in schestowitz.com alone, as it gets over a million hit per month, most of which seem to originate in botnets as they target login/posting pages). In order words, those botnets cost a lot of money and make it less financially/technically viable to run some Web sites. Thank you, Microsoft!
People who don’t like Windows may actually be paying the price for its existence even if they never use it. Sadly, it is going to take a while before Windows is completely extinct and, in the age of fibre, crackers needn’t access more than a few millions of boxes to totally pollute the Web. Here is one new bit of commentary which has gloomy predictions:
What do you do when your business relies on your charging a hefty premium for something that no one is willing to pay for? That’s the essential problem facing Microsoft with Windows.
It is actually not the important point. Those who choose Windows deserve the suffering, but those who suffer from other people’s choice of Windows deserve a voice too. █
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