Ramblings & ephemera

Best headline ever

From Entertainment News, 21 March 2004:
“Zombies Push Jesus from Top of North American Box Office”
(About Dawn of the Dead and The Passion of the Christ)

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Prices for zombies in the Underground

From Byron Acohido and Jon Swartz’s “Going price for network of zombie PCs: $2,000-$3,000” (USA TODAY: 8 September 2004):
In the calculus of Internet crime, two of the most sought-after commodities are zombie PCs and valid e-mail addresses.
One indication of the going rate for zombie PCs comes from a June 11 posting on SpecialHam.com, an electronic [...]

Credit cards sold in the Underground

From David Kirkpatrick’s “The Net’s not-so-secret economy of crime” (Fortune: 15 May 2006):
Raze Software offers a product called CC2Bank 1.3, available in freeware form - if you like it, please pay for it. …
But CC2Bank’s purpose is the management of stolen credit cards. Release 1.3 enables you to type in any credit card number and [...]

Even worse spam is coming

From Spam Daily News’s “Spam zombies from outer space“:
Spammers could soon use zombie computers in a totally new way. Infected computers could run programs that spy into a person’s email, mine it for information, and generate realistic-looking replies.
John Aycock, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Calgary, and his student Nathan [...]

Zombies from China attack Internet

From Computerworld’s “Army of zombies invades China“:
China’s rapid Internet growth has brought with it a somewhat disturbing side effect: multiplying zombies up to no good.
Zombies, or Internet-connected computers infected by worms or viruses and under the control of a hacker, are used to launch denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, or send spam or phishing e-mails. An average [...]

A cared-for mummy

From “Mummified woman died naturally“:
A woman whose mummified body was dressed in a white gown and placed in front of a television for 2½ years died from heart disease. …
Officials never suspected abuse or foul play after finding Johannas Pope, 61, in her Madisonville home Jan. 4.
Pope told her caretaker, Kathy Painter, she didn’t want [...]

Zombies! 100s of 1000s of zombies!

From The New York Times‘ “An Army of Soulless 1’s and 0’s“:
Officials at the F.B.I. and the Justice Department say their inquiries on the zombie networks are exposing serious vulnerabilities in the Internet that could be exploited more widely by saboteurs to bring down Web sites or online messaging systems. One case under investigation, officials [...]