Great Reporting by Brian Krebs

During the Mike Lynn affair I found Brian Krebs' reporting to be invaluable. Now he has provided an excellent story on the arrest of the Zotob and Mytob worm authors. I recommend you read the story linked from Brian's blog. Highlights include:

"Both of the suspects' nicknames can be found in the original computer programming code for Zotob, according to the FBI and Microsoft...

The author of the original Blaster worm remains at large, and Microsoft has offered a $250,000 bounty for information leading the arrest and conviction of that person...

[E]vidence indicates Ekici paid Essebar to develop the worms, which the two used for financial gain...

[T]he two men are alleged to have forwarded financial information stolen from victims' computers to a credit card fraud ring.

[P]olice who raided Essebar's home found a computer that contained the original programming instructions for the first version of the Zotob worm."

I am glad to see action against a different leg of the risk triad, namely threats. It's no use to only address vulnerabilities if the threats who exploit those vulnerabilities are free to constantly develop innovative new attacks.

Ryan Naraine also wrote a good article called Inside Microsoft's Zotob Situation Room.

Incidentally, Andy Sullivan of Reuters is another great "old media" reporter. He's written about Def Con and other issues.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Darn, I'm going to have to reevaluate my categorization of Brian Krebs as a Geraldo instead of a Journalist.

I initially dumped him into the Geraldo category when I saw him writing quotes of people who hadn't actually talked to him. What he had them saying wasn't damaging or grossly misprepresentative, mind. It just seemed that he had been paraphrasing email sent to others, which had leakily ended up forwarded to his inbox. Putting that in quotes without mentioning where the "quote" was from was slop, and led me to doubt his accuracy on other matters. Of course, it could have been an editor on a cutting spree responsible for converting an acknowledged paraphrase into a "quote."

So, given his useful and apparently accurate coverage recently, I'm going to have to remove him from the Geraldo category, and perhaps even call him a Journalist. <grin>
12:57 AM
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