Too cool for error handling
KmsdBot botnet is down after operator sends typo in command
Somewhere out there, a botnet operator is kicking themselves and probably hoping no one noticed the typo they transmitted in a command that crashed their whole operation. Unfortunately for the typographically-challenged botnetter, it happened on the internet, so someone knows: Akamai, in this case, had been watching for some …
COMMENTS
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Thursday 8th December 2022 22:00 GMT Michael Wojcik
I'm not a huge fan of go, but I don't see it as responsible here. It correctly detected an index-out-of-range and raised an exception. That's a good feature.
The problem is the developer, who didn't catch the exception and handle it properly (i.e. by aborting the operation and returning to a known state).
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Tuesday 6th December 2022 22:40 GMT doublelayer
I'm sure they will, but they'll need to go back to the old infection vectors and there may have been many different ones used which they'll have to disentangle from logs (probably there are logs, but not necessarily in a convenient place). Also, any infected machine that hardened their SSH config or passwords but didn't scan for infection may not be infectable using the old methods. Not perfect, but it is a setback.
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Tuesday 6th December 2022 19:40 GMT elregidente
Phobos 1
"Phobos 1 was an uncrewed Soviet space probe of the Phobos Program launched from the Baikonour launch facility on 7 July 1988. Its intended mission was to explore Mars and its moons Phobos and Deimos. The mission failed on 2 September 1988 when a computer malfunction caused the end-of-mission order to be transmitted to the spacecraft. At the time of launch it was the heaviest interplanetary spacecraft ever launched, weighing 6200 kg."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phobos_1
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Wednesday 7th December 2022 02:16 GMT that one in the corner
Re: Phobos 1
> computer malfunction caused the end-of-mission order to be transmitted to the spacecraft
The malfunction was fully described by Comrade Chief Programmer Hank T. Picklehammerovitch The Third, shortly before his disappearance during a tour of the local borscht factory. "His departure was a mysterious as his arrival" a colleague was reported to say.
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Thursday 8th December 2022 04:24 GMT doublelayer
Re: re: Agile development.
Does waterfall exist? As far as I can tell, waterfall is a word meaning "Something the Agile people don't want to be associated with Agile". In fairness to Agile, I'm not sure it exists either. I think most places that claim to use Agile do whatever they want with some of the words used. Still, it's weird to see so many people arguing how great Agile is while telling me that everyone I've seen calling themselves Agile while getting bad results is not actually doing it and defending any part of the manifesto that suggests negative things as not meaning what it says.
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Wednesday 7th December 2022 22:32 GMT doublelayer
Re: No Go
It's not about types. Unless you strong type to the extent that array types have their length hardcoded, you can have an out of range error, and even if you do, you can still have the parse error that led to the problem in the first place. No compiler can fix "There were fewer spaces in this string than I expected", but an if statement can.
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Wednesday 7th December 2022 22:33 GMT doublelayer
Re: Don't work have you turn it on and off?
I would think so, but as it was attacking Linux boxes, probably many of them are servers that people don't reboot very often unless they're broken. The authors of the bot don't get to reboot them themselves, so they'd have to hope that operators will coincidentally reboot sometime soon unless they're willing to be active and go re-infect each one.
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