Revenge of the Nerd

While home reading Slashdot in his underwear (a favorite pastime of unemployed IT workers), Sendai comes up with a new investment strategy. A pathetic little company named Fiasco is falsely claiming ownership of Linux copyrights, trying to extort money from users, and filing multibillion dollar lawsuits. Sendai is sure that this is a stock scam and that Fiasco s claims are frivolous. Meanwhile, mainstream investors seem so fixated by the enormous amount of money Fiasco seeks that they lose their critical thinking ability. The stock is bid up from pennies to over $5! Sendai takes out a huge short position, planning to cover when the stock tumbles back down. Since the claims have no merit, that can t take long.

Boy is he wrong! The Fiasco stock (symbol: SCUMX) climbs rapidly . At $9 per share, Sendai receives a margin call from his broker. Being unwilling to take the huge SCUMX loss, Sendai sells all his other positions and also wires most of the balance from his checking account to the brokerage. This allows him to hold the position, which is certain to plummet soon! It rises further. Maybe this is still due to initial uncritical hype. Perhaps the momentum traders are on board now. Maybe some investors know that anti-Linux corporations Microsoft and Sun secretly are funneling money to Fiasco. At $12, Sendai is woken by another early morning margin call and he lacks the money to further fund the account. He is forced to buy back shares to cover his position, and doing so further raises the price of this thinly traded stock. His account value is devastated.

In a fit of rage and immaturity, Sendai decides to take down Fiasco s Web site. They are using it to propagate lies and deception in furtherance of criminal stock fraud, he reasons. Sendai does not consider his own recent stock shenanigans when judging Fiasco.

Web sites are taken down by attackers daily, usually using a brute packet flood from many source machines (known as a distributed denial of service attack). Sendai realizes that much more elegant and effective attacks are possible by exploiting weaknesses in TCP protocol implementations rather than raw packet floods. Sendai has taken down much bigger Web sites than Fiasco s from a simple modem connection. His favorite tool for doing this is a privately distributed application known as Ndos. He reviews the usage instructions.

Ndos Denial of Service Tool Options

 # ndos Ndos 0.04 Usage: ndos [options] target_host portnum Supported options: -D <filename> Send all data from given file into the opened connection    (must fit in 1 packet) -S <IP or hostname> Use the given machine as the attack source address (may    require -e).  Otherwise source IPs are randomized. -e <devicename> Use the given device to send the packets through. -w <msecs> Wait given number of milliseconds between sending fresh probes -P Activates polite mode, which actually closes the connections it opens    and acks data received. -W <size> The TCP window size to be used. -p <portnum> Initial source port used in loop -l <portnum> The lowest source port number ndos should loop through. -h <portnum> The highest source port number used in loop -m <mintimeout> The lowest allowed receive timeout (in ms). -b <num> Maximum number of packets that can be sent in a short burst -d <debuglevel> 

 

Ndos is one of those tools that has no documentation (other than the usage screen) and is full of obscure parameters that must be set properly. But once the right values are determined from experimentation or actual understanding, it is deadly effective. Sendai starts it up at a relatively subdued packet rate from a hacked Linux box. You can bet that the -P option was not given. The Fiasco Web site is down until the compromised box is discovered and disconnected three days later.

Although his little temper tantrum was slightly gratifying, Sendai is still broke, jobless, and miserable. Only one thing cheers him up ”the upcoming annual Defcon hacker conference! This provides the rare opportunity to hang out with all his buddies from around the world, in person instead of on IRC. Sendai worries whether he can even afford to go now. Stolen credit card numbers are not wisely used for flight reservations . Counting the pitiful remains of his checking and brokerage accounts, as well as the remainder of his credit card limit, Sendai scrapes up enough for the trip to Las Vegas. Lodging is another matter. After mailing several friends , his hacker buddy Don Crotcho (a.k.a The Don) offers to share his Alexis Park hotel room for free.

The following weeks pass quickly, with Sendai living cheaply on ramen noodles and Kraft macaroni and cheese. He would like to try more investment hacking, but that requires money to start out with. Sendai blames Microsoft for his current condition, due in part to their clandestine funding of Fiasco, and also because he is one of those people who find reasons to blame Microsoft for almost all their problems in life.