Comment by Scryptonite
8 years ago
Reminds me of a time I once wrote a script in Node to send an endless stream of bytes at a slow & steady pace to bots that were scanning for vulnerable endpoints. It would cause them to hang, preventing them from continuing on to their next scanning job, some remaining connected for as long as weeks.
I presume the ones that gave out sooner were manually stopped by whoever maintains them or they hit some sort of memory limit. Good times.
I do the same to "Microsoft representatives" that call me because I have "lots of malware on my computer".
Keep them on line by being a very dumb customer until they start cursing and hang up on me. : - )
1-347-514-7296 is a phone number that automates this. Add it to a conference call, and frustrate the caller with no additional work. http://Reddit.com/r/itslenny is the closest thing it has to an official site.
There's also this person https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzedMdx6QG4, counter call-flooding the scammers' phone lines.
Thanks, I hadn't heard of Lenny before. Jolly Roger is similar thing - creator gave a Ted talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXVJ4JQ3SUw
It just rang forever when I tried it...
2 replies →
Doesn't that burn up a lot of time? I just cut straight to the hanging-up part, with optional cursing to taste.
Yes, it burns their time. I just put them on speaker phone and continue working as usual on my computer, occasionally uttering a "yes" or "what's that?" when they tell me for the hundredth time to go to some phishing site. It's astonishing how long it takes for them to give up.
When working from home this is one of the few joys/social interactions if the day :D
This is actually a new take on a fairly well known security/DoS attack called the "slow post" attack (https://blog.qualys.com/securitylabs/2012/01/05/slow-read)
pretty novel to see it used the other way around though!