It seems some enterprising individual in Grand Forks, North Dakota has been placing fake parking violations on cars. If the recipient visited the URL on the flyer, they would be told to install a toolbar to view pictures of their vehicle. That piece of malicious software would then attempt to install several more. The actual vehicle pictures were from Grand Forks, but we wouldn’t be surprised to see a similar attack happen in a much larger city.
wow, spam moving to real life. I can’t wait until I start getting flyers in the mail trying to get me to download botnet clients.
I don’t know of one government bureau that would have “CLICK ME FOR THE PICTURE SEARCH TOOLBAR” in all caps on their website. The guy could have at least made the site look a little more convincing.
i beleive this was a practical joke played on our campus to target specific groups of people
kick ass, as a local u find ppl suck at parking especial the northerners (dam Canadians)
ya know what i actually don’t mind this one too much. if it is for those buttheads who take up 4 spots in a parking lot including a handicapped spot because they just got their toyota prius washed and want to be all smug about it, then yes i would put one of those on their car in a heartbeat. this is a great idea.
Wow, that’s really clever.
To the guy complaining about Candians, at least we know what that little stick on the left side of the steering wheel does! ;)
i don’t see whats wrong with this? learn to park douchebags!
also canada is far prettier
psssh, Canada isn’t prettier, look at surry.
Given that recent studies have shown that a 1 in 1e6 installation to sale rate is an exceptionally good outcome for a malware peddler, I’m not too worried about this hitting physical methods of distribution. It’s far too costly, and much harder to target the ignorant.
The most sophisticated malware is still spread through SMTP. This means as a malware author you can still depend on peoples ignorance->human intervention to propagate your stuff.
This scheme works based on that same ideology.
Canada is clearly better than the US because it’s full of Canadians.
Also how is this a hack? this site jumped the shark….some time ago. Show me something cool that someone built.
I like the idea(learn to park jackass!!), though liam is absolutely correct about the distribution issue.
Another thing is this guy apparently has way too much time on his hands. The way I see it he has to first find some dumbass (which shouldn’t be that hard as the world is full of them), get out plave the site info on said dumbass ,then sit in his car to upload pics to his webserver for the payload.
Shouldn’t he be skateboarding?
heh… I just park my land yacht a few inches from the driver door of the offending vehicle. gonna park like a fool, gonna climb over your center console like a fool. it’s times like these I love driving an old tank beater.
oh yeah… wouldn’t work too well with the cars in the pic, but I usually do that to people that park just over the line the other way from the pic.
You have to give them credit. Very clever.
That’s hilarious. I can’t say that I’ve ever approved of spreading malware, but I like this.
I work at a big truck repair facility and our parking spaces are huge, enough for semi trucks easily. I could park two of my cars in the parking space. We had a lady that drove her husband’s corvette to work a couple times and she would intentionally pull the nose into the next spot(angled). I wanted to pull right up against it, but I didn’t have faith in her ability to pull it out without damaging my car. Sometimes I wish I drove a beater like sly.
@lame hack: How is this a hack? Really? Have you ever heard of social engineering?
This is a pretty clever trick that the perpetrator came up with (not that I am a fan of malware, but you have to give him credit).
If you are so offended by these articles, why are you still here?
@mike: One of my summer jobs way back in the day was paving roads, which of course involves creating lanes of cones for people to drive through. We had a massive dumptruck (not ours) navigate this S-curve so well that he got cheers from the entire crew (he must have had less than an inch of clearance on either side). Of course within 30 seconds some soccer-mom in a minivan comes barreling through and takes out half the cones…
Like i said in my last comment, means of propagation even with advanced malware is trivial. Email attachments are still working over a decade later; bot nets are built with them.
People don’t care about abstraction they just want convenient social networking. This vector works based on that same ideology.
you see these stories all the time and you think that’s clever why didn’t I think of that… because most of us are not evil… or have anything to sell,
or for social engineering nothing is worth prying into verses the consequences, hence that story a while back about http://hackaday.com/2008/08/13/possible-entrapment-scenario-in-hacking-case/ Brian Salcedo who was doing a nine year stretch.. unless there is an ethical reason or you don’t want have to call joey greco on a cheating spouse..
I dont know..
That is outfreakin’standing. What a great way to nail idiots who can’t park. I like it. I think everyone should do it!
I know A LOT of cars that I’d love to see this happen to…
in the past I’ve driven an off-road rig (that I actually used for off-roading)… if I can park an extended cab, long bed, pickup on 35″ tires with almost no rearward visibility within an inch of dead center in the space, then there’s no excuse for the chump driving the car small enough to be parked in the space sideways yet somenow crooked and over the line.
though when I did have that truck I used to love pulling right up next to the driver’s door… and if I was lucky I got to watch the show as to tried to climb over the center console to get into the drivers seat… one time a co-worker and I double-teamed a horribly parked mini… watching that snooty b*tch climb though the hatch was priceless.
Nice one. It’s always good to see people like this punished. It’s always those with the biggest cars that don’t know how to park them. And this way, you get more ongoing pleasure infecting their PC’s with your malware than you would parking them in. Nice.
Hell yes North Dakota is on Hack A Day! I live in North Dakota so it’s pretty interesting because I didn’t even know about this until I just stumbled upon it which would be now.