Spam Caught, In A Tin Of Spam

June 15, 2021 by Jenny List 19 Comments

We’ve seen many inventive enclosures for single board computers over the years: some are decorative, others utilitarian, and yet more tailored to an application. This one from [Daniel Hepper] manages to be all three: a practical enclosure for an OrangePi Zero LTS running the PiHole web spam filter, enclosed in a seemingly unopened Spam tin.

The inspiration came from an out-of-date tin of Spam, a souvenir that had lain around for a decade. It had a paper label that could be carefully removed, after which a Dremel was used to cut an aperture in the reverse of the tin. The tasty-but-expired luncheon meat could then be scooped out, and a 3D-printed carrier for the OrangePi slid in. The label reattached, it looks for all the world like an unopened tin of Spam with a PoE cable emerging from its behind.

The constant war on spam has seen many creative attempts at a solution from within our community, and it’s certain that PiHole is one of the better ways to deal with its web-borne variants. It is however not unknown for a Hackaday scribe to play a part in delivering it.

Weaponized Networked Printing Is Now A Thing

December 7, 2018 by Tom Nardi 37 Comments

It’s a fairly safe bet that a Venn diagram of Hackaday readers and those who closely follow the careers of YouTube megastars doesn’t have a whole lot of overlap, so you’re perhaps blissfully unaware of the man who calls himself [PewDiePie]. As such, you might not know that a battle between himself and another YouTube channel which uploads Bollywood music videos has reached such a fever pitch that his fans have resorted to guerrilla hacking to try to sway public opinion towards their side. It’s perhaps not the dystopian future we imagined, but it just might be the one we deserve.

To briefly summarize the situation, a hacker known only by the handle [TheHackerGiraffe] decided to help out Dear Leader by launching an automated attack against 50,000 Internet connected printers. When the hack was successful, the printer would spit out a page of digital propaganda, complete with fist ASCII art, that urged the recipient to go on YouTube and pledge their support for [PewDiePie]. There’s some debate about how many of the printers [TheHackerGiraffe] targeted actually delivered their payload, but judging by reactions throughout social media, it was enough to get the message out.

While the stunt itself may have come as a surprise, the methodology wasn’t. In fact, the only surprising element to the security researchers who’ve weighed in on the situation is that this hasn’t happened more often. It certainly isn’t the first time somebody’s done it, but the fact that this time its been connected to such a high profile Internet celebrity is putting more eyes on the problem then there have been in the past. Now that the proverbial cat is out of the bag, there are even websites springing up which claim to be purveyors of “Printer Advertising”. Odds are good this won’t be the last time somebody’s printer starts running off more than TPS reports.

We here at Hackaday don’t have much interest in the battle for YouTube supremacy. We’re just pulling for Dave Jones’s EEVBlog channel to join [AvE] in breaking a million subscribers. But we’re very interested in the technology which made this attack possible, how likely it is we’re going to see more people exploit it, and what are we supposed to do now that even our own printers can be turned against us?

Continue reading “Weaponized Networked Printing Is Now A Thing” →

Hello, And Please Don’t Hang Up: The Scourge Of Robocalls

November 12, 2018 by Jonathan Bennett 113 Comments

Over the last few months, I’ve noticed extra calls coming in from local numbers, and if you live in the US, I suspect maybe you have too. These calls are either just dead air, or recordings that start with “Please don’t hang up.” Out of curiosity, I’ve called back on the number the call claims to be from. Each time, the message is that this number has been disconnected and is no longer in service. This sounds like the plot of a budget horror movie, how am I being called from a disconnected number? Rather than a phantom in the wires, this is robocalling, combined with caller ID spoofing.

Continue reading “Hello, And Please Don’t Hang Up: The Scourge Of Robocalls” →

Defeating Reddit’s CAPTCHA

August 11, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 14 Comments

cap

Here’s something we’re sure SEO specialists, PR reps, and other marketeers already know: how to write a script to game reddit.

The course of upvotes and downvotes controls which submission makes it to the front page of reddit. These submissions are voted on by users, and new accounts must log in and complete a CAPTCHA to vote. [Ian] discovered that reddit’s CAPTCHA is not really state-of-the-art, and figured out how to get a bot to solve it

The method exploits the 8-bit nature of the distorted grid in the CAPTCHA. Because this grid isn’t pure black or pure white, it’s at a lower intensity than the letters in the CAPTCHA. Putting the CAPTCHA through a threshold filter, deleting any blocks of pixels smaller than 20 pixels, and running it through a classifier (PDF there), a bot can guess what the letters of the CAPTCHA should be.

Out of the 489 CAPTCHAs [Ian] fed into his algorithm, only 28 – or 5.73% – were guessed correctly. However, because he knows which CAPTCHAs had failed segmentation, ignoring those can increase the success rate to 10%. Theoretically, by requesting new CAPTCHAs, [Ian] can get the accuracy of his CAPTCHA bot up to about 30%.

Combine this with a brilliant auto voting script that only requires someone to enter CAPTCHAs, and you’ve got the recipe for getting anything you want directly to the front page of reddit. Of course you could do the same with a few memes and pictures of cats, but you knew that already.

Company Shutdown Causes 2/3rds Drop In All Spam

November 12, 2008 by Eliot 26 Comments

The Washington Post is reporting that the shutdown of one hosting company has caused the total volume of spam to drop by 2/3rds. The company in question is McColo Corp. Both Hurricane Electric and Global Crossing pulled the plug today after a damning report revealed a number of illegal activities happening on McColo’s servers. McColo already had a reputation with the security community. When contacted about abuse, the company would often shift servers to new IP ranges instead of shutting them down. Although not the main source of spam, the company was host to many botnet control servers and phishing sites.

[photo: mattdork]

[via Waxy]

Antivirus Products Still Fail On Fresh Viruses

August 15, 2008 by Kimberly Lau 10 Comments

Many computer users rely on antivirus software from McAfee and Symantec to protect their computers from malware, worms, and viruses. Since the creation of viruses outpaces the protection abilities of the software, antivirus protection lags behind and may not be as secure as you think. [Gary Warner] provides some examples of current malware making the rounds that continue to be unaddressed by anti-virus vendors, including the recent “CNN Alerts: Breaking News” spam, which morphed into MSNBC alert spoofs. Our advice? Keep your antivirus software updated, but don’t believe that it will catch everything for you. Only open files from sources you know and trust.