Sorry your browser is not supported!

You are using an outdated browser that does not support modern web technologies, in order to use this site please update to a new browser.

Browsers supported include Chrome, FireFox, Safari, Opera, Internet Explorer 10+ or Microsoft Edge.

Geek Culture / Damn'd Software Pirates >:(

Author
Message
Shadow Robert
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 22nd Sep 2002
Location: Hertfordshire, England
Posted: 8th Oct 2002 19:14
Link
As I do most nights, I left my system on updating the library between home and work...
During this time I was hacked, rather than Norton Internet Security Blocking this hack - somehow they got into my system without altering it, however triggered Microsoft Personal Guard.
Rather than taking any software/models which is normally what happen if someone gets past - they spread some kinda of virus, it has rewritten my BIOS, disabled WinXP Home Edition and deleted the applications start up files (basically ALL EXEs on my system were deleted!!) ... this virus then went onto destroy half the information before finally doing something that destoryed my motherboard and processor - plus the same happened at work on the my machine there!
Thank god atleast the HDDs are in perfect shape and after a low-level format and reformat to NTFS I've used a slower machine to install WinXP Pro which i've just gone out and purchased.

Right now i'm out about 3months worth of work, and need a brand new system for home (as you can't use Max,Maya,trueSpace of Lightwave properly on a P2 266) plus no doubt i'm gonna have to foot half the bill for the work machine as well.

I do have some source and such from a backup a few days back, so hopefully shouldn't affect any DB projects too much other than the less time I have due to catchin up at work ... I'll see about rewriting the AthentiCode tonight once I have contacted DELL about a new PC :: sighs :: - and I do have gameSpace as well (1.5.0.a) so about a week less of work - swear die if i had to rewrite all of that from scratch.

just really wanted to blow off some steam about this - but think there should be something done about this bloody hackers ... i mean just freakin' flagrant damages, what the heck it the damn'd point!?!

ya know personally i wanna someone to come up with a program that if someone hacks you, it bloody hacks them back and deletes windows or something >
really not in a good mood though, and might not be around for a few days ... so if no one gets responses from me its because i'm hyperbusy - sorry

i miss my Optiron
Holy jumping mother of god NOOOO!!!...
Ahem I mean, I'll think about it
Back to top
Profile PM Email Website
Van B
Moderator
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 8th Oct 2002
Location: Sunnyvale
Posted: 8th Oct 2002 19:27
Link
I know the feeling (sorta), I lost 2 years of work at my last job, 200 complex engineering drawings had to be done from scratch because of a cruddy little virus - killed the hard drive outright. Back then, the only backup device we had was attached to the account managers PC, no real backup was kept . Luckily, it was the IT manager who brought in the virus on a floppy and not me.

You have no luck with system crashes though Vegeta, maybe you should get a nice big DAT backup system.


Van-B
Back to top
Profile PM Email
CD On CD
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 23rd Sep 2002
Location: United States
Posted: 8th Oct 2002 19:27
Link
raven:

QUOTE:
"ya know personally i wanna someone to come up with a program that if someone hacks you, it bloody hacks them back and deletes windows or something"

yes! that's exactly what i was thinking about. wishing someone could come up with such a program!!

sorry to hear about this happening to you.

United We (Still) Stand
Back to top
Profile PM Email Website
Martyn Pittuck
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 27th Aug 2002
Location: United Kingdom
Posted: 8th Oct 2002 19:31
Link
Any Back-Ups?

If you do then the software should allow you to boot from a CD then put the back-up back on the PC.

Bois is a problem, but a fixable one. You should be able to back-up or print the bios. Mine uses the factory settings so all the details are in the manual.

A virus cannot do much more so when the BOIS is working the whole system should work again...

The Outside is a evil place to be, too much light, too much noise and too many distractions....
I went outside once and my FPS rate dropped to 5.
Back to top
Profile PM Email Website
EgoAnt
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 27th Aug 2002
Location: Canada
Posted: 8th Oct 2002 19:57
Link
Ah... Like in shadowrun we could all have "Black IC" (IC = Intrusion Countermeasures)

That would be sweet, like Pavlov's dogs we could send a big electric shock back to the hacker to ring their bell... Heh. Then maybe they'd get the idea. Of course, you'd end up jolting a lot of people who didn't even know they had the virus. Ah, well, so you nail a couple innocent bystanders in the war against hackers, if the policy works for the USA, it must be okay... <sly grin>
Back to top
Profile PM Email Website
Rob K
Retired Moderator
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 10th Sep 2002
Location: Surrey, United Kingdom
Posted: 8th Oct 2002 23:11
Link
A virus rewriting your BIOS? That is a pretty unusuall thing! - My BIOS has a Flash Update lock jumper on the motherboard

what is a signature?
Back to top
Profile PM Email Website
Proteus
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 4th Oct 2002
Location: The Future
Posted: 9th Oct 2002 00:54
Link
lucky you...I know I don't have this kind of physical protection...

Back to top
Profile PM Email Website
Shadow Robert
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 22nd Sep 2002
Location: Hertfordshire, England
Posted: 9th Oct 2002 02:16
Link
Hahaa some of you are funny...
This happen's alot to me, crashes due to virus (as Van and the others know) - but never had someone actually just be out for wanton damage, normally its a case of breaking out Norton Rescue Disks and Fixing WinMe/XP/2000's registry.
But a real number has been done on my system, been working all day ... my living room looks like some techy junkie's dream with wires and boards everywhere, nothing in a case.

The bios chip is dead - as if someone took a magnet and simply wiped it, as getting new ones are more expensive than new boards. CPU also has a general protection fault (or so Windows and Norton First Aid tell me) - basically it works at 1.2Ghz, however doesn't recognise as any cpu other than it is a x86 series - so no MMX,SSI,3DNow!, PowerNow! - it is a pure CPU ... might as well be scraped as well

Still tests going on as we speak from the AMD engineer, but and i quote "How the HELL did this happen? I've never seen damage like this before!" - so i'm guessing there are gonna be alot of unanswered questions.

Been meticulously checking the memory of all my systems, even the safe backup which is only attached every few days... I mean I do have a backup, just not of the most recent work - right now have 4x 140Gb HDDs full, and was waiting on a new 180Gb one this week so i could start making backups again. There is an aweful lot of work, but as alot of backups i create are CGI Max and Maya scenes - oftenly 2 or 3 layer final renders as well at 2560x1024 ...
those HDDs fill up fast.

Right now damn'd tired, finally got at&t to setup the t1 on a rotation band ... so now my connection to the net is secure but no downloading or uploading to peer connections.

Hope everyone elses days have been better
Oh and welcome to DBpro Van - been wonderin' when you'll join us on the dark side

Holy jumping mother of god NOOOO!!!...
Ahem I mean, I'll think about it
Back to top
Profile PM Email Website
Rpg Cyco
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 26th Aug 2002
Location: Australia
Posted: 9th Oct 2002 03:00
Link
Bloody hackers. They should die em to posts so we can throw rocks at them! Yes? lol jk If they caught the guy who done this to you? He would go to jail wouldn't he?

l8ter

Rpg Cyco

http://www.rpgcyco.com - My Website & Forums
Specs: PIII - 866MHz, 128MB SDRAM, 8MB SiS 630, 17inch monitor, 18.6GB HDD 5400rpm, Win ME, DX8.1b, 56k Modem
Back to top
Profile PM Email Website
indi
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 26th Aug 2002
Location: Earth, Brisbane, Australia
Posted: 9th Oct 2002 08:06
Link
I have a honeypot mac

I leave all these windows bomb exes with differnet names in my honey pot.

Its funny when they actually download them. who knows if they run them, They shouldnt be snooping in my honey pot.

bad news vegeta, It sounds worse than a virus if its written your BIOS.

Did you install something similar on both that was infected?

www.grisoft.com has AVG a low level free hueristics virus checker with a small foot print and stops those nasty windows virus exploits also.


yuk losing stuff due to hackers is bad mojo,

Consider switching your pc off at night for these reasons

security
lightning
moving parts
electricity

and the most important is those little green and orange lights in the room when its dark to be switched off

no website at moment
Back to top
Profile PM Email
Martyn Pittuck
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 27th Aug 2002
Location: United Kingdom
Posted: 9th Oct 2002 10:40
Link
Good news!

There have been a load of security updates from norton and zonealarm over the past 5 hours. Hopefully the new Virus is now protected against.

The Outside is a evil place to be, too much light, too much noise and too many distractions....
I went outside once and my FPS rate dropped to 5.
Back to top
Profile PM Email Website
Shadow Robert
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 22nd Sep 2002
Location: Hertfordshire, England
Posted: 9th Oct 2002 18:28
Link
Small update on this all today ... annoyingly i was knackered at 4pm but never got to bed until almost 2am
The AMD engineer also left pretty late, about 11pm.
He did find that the Virus (or whatever the hell it was) was still hiding in my DvD Ram Cache - whoever has done this was out for damage and damage alone! Still couldn't track where the hell it came from
Doesn't look like a standard hacker who sends a simple virus they've got thier grubby hands on, everytime we found something new this seemed more and more professional.
Got into work just now to find out that another 3 machines have been hit, and as they're not on an external network there really is only one possible thing i can think of.

Have to make a statment to the IAPHA later about the inccidents, normally I usually send an email report and someone would be given a slap on the wrist by the cops or be fined - in this case as damages have been done whoever done this would be in extreme trouble. Not sure what because i'm not good with the legal punishment for industrial sabotures.

Also need to call Nortons again and find out when the engineer from there is to come and pickup what was found.
From the extent of the damages on all of the systems, it has been reconed that the whole thing has been hard coded in something low level.

However annoyingly alot of a current background project now looks to be scrapped completely - so expect not to hear much about new projects for a little while ... atleast no updates - knowing the bloody suits they'll make all the announcements without telling us.

Well atleast one thing, it is quite funny seeing a team connected together over the meeting table with thier laptops

Holy jumping mother of god NOOOO!!!...
Ahem I mean, I'll think about it
Back to top
Profile PM Email Website
EgoAnt
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 27th Aug 2002
Location: Canada
Posted: 9th Oct 2002 21:04
Link
Hmmm, you haven't been doing any snooping around in government or mafia computers that you shouldn't have, have you Raven? Heh. Government hired cyborg assassins are next!
Back to top
Profile PM Email Website
rapscaLLion
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 29th Aug 2002
Location: Canada
Posted: 10th Oct 2002 00:14
Link
Sorry to hear it! That's just a load of crap, who ever did that is severly demented! Catch him for us ok? (I don't wanna be hit!)

Alex Wanuch
aka rapscaLLion
Get the DB Weekly Newsletter at www.dbwn.cjb.net
Back to top
Profile PM
Shadow Robert
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 22nd Sep 2002
Location: Hertfordshire, England
Posted: 10th Oct 2002 00:59
Link
lookit, lunchtime and already seems like the place has closed down
well most of the computer studios are currently in peices being worked over by engineers, alot of safe guards are being setup - been over to blizzard just a lil while ago, check to see if they've had any problems - and they're offices look the same as ours
So right now sitting at home with a few mate, coupla WW and coupla Blizzard crew - playin' a few games over the lan, checking out forums... not really doin' a hell of alot
Looks like we all have until next monday off just to safe guard everything, studio in Las Vegas has been altered but no problems so - from what i know they're gonna be invaded by norton engineers tommorrow for an upgrade and systems tap just in case.
One thing I've gotta say, certainly alot of excitement (well after the shock of the loss of so much work) ...
do have good news, the earth&beyond server is still up - apparently its in another building or on another line, i dunno ... but atleast the online universe is oki
and the Irvine servers have been autorouted to our LA ones - so no one should notice anything more than a slight sluggishness.

gotta say my home has alot been interesting - as yesterday my serial code to WinXP Pro, was actually wrong!
They had printed a corporation edition (i didn't even know they sold them) on the cd case and gave me a new one.
My luck yesterday has gotta be the worst in ages - but atleast everything is finally getting back to normal, or atleast at home
Several days off should allow me to install all my software again and catch up a lil... atleast all the work i lost was to erm -a game- which is not being continued for the time being, well basically i'm oki on the catching up - probably be told to restart the graphics development again anyways.

Well gonna checkout the forums a lil more, work a spell on my AuthentiCode stuff and GUI library

Holy jumping mother of god NOOOO!!!...
Ahem I mean, I'll think about it
Back to top
Profile PM Email Website
DrakeX
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 26th Aug 2002
Location:
Posted: 10th Oct 2002 06:54
Link
wha..? how the holy hell did a virus screw up physical stuff? umm i'd really like to know! i didn't think that was possible!

that sucks majorly tho <--(god i wish the would be kinda sad-looking like it does on the RGT forums) why do people do this kind of shit? they think it's funny?

i'm looking at yooooou!
Back to top
Profile PM Email
Shadow Robert
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 22nd Sep 2002
Location: Hertfordshire, England
Posted: 10th Oct 2002 07:01
Link
well my guess and most others is industrial espionage, i was just an unfortunate person who was attacked by mistake - as my luck goes it coulda been worse
it actually doesn't take much to do the damage done, as long as you code low enough ... would have taken like a binary virus to achieve this - i've seen them in work before and basically they tell someone to goes the wrong way, and pop blows a single gate. And then everything is useless. This one must just be targeted at specific areas, binary for low level pure carnage - another memory resident polymorpic (like micheangelo). Surprising really what someone who wants to to damage can achieve
This has actually happened to an old graphics card when i installed the wrong bios many moons ago - burnt the bugga out as it was being accessed all wrong.
As they say Poppy happens and now i'm broke ... but atleast its good to know i wasn't the target

Holy jumping mother of god NOOOO!!!...
Ahem I mean, I'll think about it
Back to top
Profile PM Email Website
Dazzag
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 26th Aug 2002
Location: Cyprus
Posted: 10th Oct 2002 16:37
Link
Worst I've heard of is a virus from years ago that basically told the hard disk to speed up to it's max velocity, then told it to park the heads (remember that one??) without winding down. If I remember rightly it made sure the heads came down on track 0 (or sector 0; can't remember which) which basically meant the disk would never boot again.

Apart from that I've only heard of a certain poke you could do on the BBC Micro that basically destroyed the monitor and that's about it for hardware. Then again the BIOS is an obvious target, but surely the proper BIOS can be retrieved again from the Internet and reinstalled? Other than that I full on low level format of everything should sort it out.

Funny, I've been using the Internet for around 12 years and the worst I've ever got is the Italian virus 1 & 2 (bouncy balls?) and some virus in work that liked to make applications freeze now and again. Oh yes, and the old DOS memory resident one that showed an ASCII monster every time you pressed 'M'. Heh, one bird actually wrote her whole assignment (about 10 pages worth) without using the letter M once. Was most amusing.

Cheers

I am 99% probably lying in bed right now... so don't blame me for crappy typing
Back to top
Profile PM Email Website
Shadow Robert
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 22nd Sep 2002
Location: Hertfordshire, England
Posted: 10th Oct 2002 19:35
Link
yeah DAZ i remember that one, lost a few HDDs to it...
Ended up costing a few hundred to get a lab to take the info off
There are some real nasty peices of work out there (both virus and thos peeps who use them)

Holy jumping mother of god NOOOO!!!...
Ahem I mean, I'll think about it
Back to top
Profile PM Email Website
Van B
Moderator
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 8th Oct 2002
Location: Sunnyvale
Posted: 11th Oct 2002 15:58
Link
Yeah, I miss when most viruses were harmless, they just annoyed you really - like there we're some really funny viruses on the Atari ST - like the cookie monster virus - it would freeze the computer and bring up a little dialogue box saying "I want a cookie!", and would stay there until you typed 'cookie' .


Van-B
Back to top
Profile PM Email
AlecM
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 26th Aug 2002
Location: Concord, MA
Posted: 13th Oct 2002 07:06
Link
Damn americans...

Goto http://www.shellshockede.com
Back to top
Profile PM Email Website
Shadow Robert
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 22nd Sep 2002
Location: Hertfordshire, England
Posted: 13th Oct 2002 07:12
Link
hahaa... i don't remember most of those virus,but then again i've been an amiga man for the past what... 14years?
sounds about right.

actually i don't remember knowing what a virus was until i started using Win3.1 - never had one on my Amiga ever!
But then thats the thing, morons are out for damage now, not just content with being able to do something and prove it - i mean thats how hacking was too way back when.
you only hacked to prove you could do it, weren't in it for any information or anything...
I remember there was an amos pro program my friend wrote that you could use a serial connection and had to break each others security feature ... and when you did it'd say a rude word on thier amiga - hours of fun

Holy jumping mother of god NOOOO!!!...
Back to top
Profile PM Email Website
Back to top

Login to post a reply

Server time is: 2024-04-20 04:23:59
Your offset time is: 2024-04-20 04:23:59