Hollywood gets a lot of things wrong when it comes to technology. One of the most persistent errors that we see is the hacker character. They’re always portrayed as some kid who can perform all manner of technological magic that is just too good to be true. It turns out that one hacker in China just moved from the silver screen to reality.
Hynek Blinka, on the AVG blog, detailed his recent run-in with a Chinese hacker as he was investigating a Diablo III key logger. It’s common practice to intentionally infect your machine with a virus so that you can take it apart and find out how it works. It was pretty standard procedure until a dialog window opened up.
According to Blinka, the person who had constructed the Trojan was talking to him through a backdoor in the malware. The first thing the hacker says, “What are you doing? Why are you researching my Trojan?” If your mind isn’t blown by that, I don’t know what it will take to impress you.
Blinka continues on with the hacker pretending to be interesting in purchasing Trojans from him. The hacker knows that Blinka is debugging his Trojan and even knows that Blinka doesn’t currently have a Web cam plugged into his machine. If he had, the hacker would have been able to take remote control of the camera and get a good view of what was on the other side.
Funny enough, it turns out that the Diablo III key logger wasn’t a key logger at all. It was actually more interesting as it was hoping to steal usernames and passwords of those who are still on dial up connections. It seems almost a waste to have this advanced of a virus and wasting it on finding passwords to outdated technology.
Besides the impressive use of technology here, it’s important to note that this virus is still out there. It’s been spotted on the battle.net forums in China with users linking to an executable disguised as a video guide. It could very well migrate to the forums here in the U.S. so be on your guard. Blizzard may say that there have not been many cases of account theft, but it is still happening.
By the way, if you happen to stumble across this talkative hacker, send him my way. I would love to conduct an interview within a virus. I’d be willing to infect my worthless laptop for the chance.