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Botnet Takes Over Twitch Install and Partially Installs Gentoo 101

Posted by timothy from the nerd-rage-best-kind-of-rage dept.
WarJolt writes: The plug was pulled on the attempt to crowd-source an Arch Linux install after a botnet threatened to take over the process. Twitch Installs has been rebooted by the twitchintheshell community and Twitch Installs users managed to reinstall Arch only to be thwarted by the botnet. The botnet managed to partially install Gentoo. Users are currently in the process of reinstalling Arch.
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Botnet Takes Over Twitch Install and Partially Installs Gentoo More

Botnet Takes Over Twitch Install and Partially Installs Gentoo

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  • On Friday I suggested that it was highly likely we would see this [slashdot.org]:

    I expect some people are trying to figure out a way to install another OS on top of (or somehow in place of) Arch Linux.

    And I suspect others saw this as coming as well. I will say though, I see gentoo as being somewhat snippy and uninspired for this. I would have been really impressed had they managed to install OS X or Windows through this manner (likely the only time in my life I've said that about the latter).

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      With "short links" a wget to an obscure tld wouldn't be hard to pull off during off-hours where most people are bored/asleep. This isn't twitch plays pokemon with 10,000s of people participating.

      Combined with the ability to spamflood the API with coordinated attacks and this doesn't seem too surprising. This does make for an interesting variation of "capture the flag" though. :P

      If I was the sysadmin here: I would want to sleep with one eye open!

    • Re:I can't be the only one who saw this coming... (Score:5, Funny)

      by stephanruby ( 542433 ) on Monday November 02, 2015 @01:22AM (#50845171)

      I would have been really impressed had they managed to install OS X or Windows through this manner.

      They probably didn't want to be classified as malicious.

      • Agreed. Installing Gentoo instead of Arch might have just been a TFTFY sort of favor, not a malicious hack.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The problem is that it was one person with an army of bots doing what they pleased, rather than a collaborative clusterfuck like pokemon was, so nobody was having any fun except the botnet owner.

      • The problem is that it was one person with an army of bots doing what they pleased, rather than a collaborative clusterfuck like pokemon was, so nobody was having any fun except the botnet owner.

        Sure, but as I recall, it was only going to take one keystroke (including space or enter) per 10 minutes. Hence

        wget a

        would take an hour to enter. I'm surprised they got this far in so little time.

    • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

      by arglebargle_xiv ( 2212710 )
      Numerous friends of mine have been a victim of a similar botnet, the massive WindowsUpdate botnet, that installed Windows 10 on their machines when they were perfectly happy with Windows 7. Luckily you can upgrade back to Windows 7, but its still a worrying development. I've heard that as of early next year, the botnet will get even more aggressive in pushing out its malware.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by Provocateur ( 133110 )

        Luckily you can upgrade back to Windows 7

        You know we're a long long way from Mars when the future of computing technology is summarized like that, right there

    • On Friday I suggested that it was highly likely we would see this [slashdot.org]

      Yep.

      Personally I'm surprised that rm -r /* hasn't been forced through...a lot fewer keystrokes to succeed with that one.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by KGIII ( 973947 )

      What's funny is this is being claimed as a botnet. It wasn't. They're the dumbasses that allow an IRC connection. It just needs a few like-minded individuals and a handful of proxies. Botnet... *sighs* They'll make anything seem worse than it is.

  • I'm torn on this. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MAXOMENOS ( 9802 ) <mike&mikesmithfororegon,com> on Monday November 02, 2015 @01:08AM (#50845153) Homepage
    On the one hand, I'm not fond of black hats. On the other, that's really, really funny.

    • Re:I'm torn on this. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Aighearach ( 97333 ) on Monday November 02, 2015 @01:35AM (#50845183)

      I'm not convinced they are black hats. It is a normal outcome that when a random user tries to install a linux distro, they end up with a different one installed than they had first begun installing. If it is a crowd-sourced effort, who is to say which outcome is more deserving? If there was no intended range of possible outcomes, what exactly was the crowd's involvement supposed to be? If the crowd was supposed to simply replace some of the software, it is hard to call the experiment a success or failure; maybe somebody made a wrong predication about the outcome. I guess the failure was that they pulled the plug without discovering the outcome?

      • Re:I'm torn on this. (Score:5, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 02, 2015 @03:14AM (#50845339)

        That's SchrÃdinger Linux.
        It installs both Gentoo and Arch into a superpartition.

    • Re:I'm torn on this. (Score:5, Informative)

      by quantaman ( 517394 ) on Monday November 02, 2015 @01:47AM (#50845207)

      On the one hand, I'm not fond of black hats. On the other, that's really, really funny.

      The summary said it was a botnet, which suggests a lot of hijacked computers (and illegal unethical activity), but unless there's evidence that wasn't mentioned it could just have easily been a bunch of bots running on the person's own laptop.

    • On the one hand, I'm not fond of black hats. On the other, that's really, really funny.

      I'd have added a couple more "really"s if, instead of Gentoo, the bots switched 'em to OpenBSD

      If they got it, they probably. needed a high security OS . B-)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by KGIII ( 973947 )

      This was not some sort of black hat hacking group. Well, not really. Someone kindly pointed out that IRC is allowed. The rest took care of itself. See the prior thread. It was done for lulz, not for black hat type of things. There wasn't even really a botnet, that I know of. Just a few people with big ol' list of proxies and a refresher in IRC scripting.

  • What language is this written in? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    This is painful to read. Are the moderators sleeping?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by blavallee ( 729704 )
      Yeah, it discusses a strange experiment, assuming everyone understands the details.

      Basically, it's a democratic attempt to enter commands into the CLI.
      With the end goal of installing the Arch Linux OS.

      Because the most popular command entered, wins. The experiment was hijacked by someone using a botnet, resulting in a majority.
      Nothing malicious, most likely a prank. Since the hijack was installing an alternative distro (Gentoo).

      If the organizers don't want to see something like this happen agai

      • But what about how the Slashdot article text has no semantic meaning?

        • Does it have an unsemantic meaning?

        • But what about how the Slashdot article text has no semantic meaning?

          Slashdot have out-sourced their crowd-funded story-editing to a Chinese botnet.

          In a day or two I'm sure we'll see the improvements in grammar, spelling and general sense.

          • Upon further review, it appears that the article text was written by someone that was intimately familiar with some Twitch happening, and wrote something from that perspective. Not really written as news, or with any general appeal in mind at all. Combine that with the blog like ramblings of Bennett, and I seriously wonder why I keep coming here. Kind of a compulsion more than anything.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gl4ss ( 559668 )

        was the install broadcasted on twitch? you'd think that users were trying to install arch linux on twitch's servers and some strange botnet showed up or some shit like that

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Cederic ( 9623 )

        Oh! That makes far more sense.

        I was interpreting it as some fucked up twitch based interactive tutorial on how to install a linux distro on your own PC.

        Tuning in to crowdsource screwing over someone else's PC is equally odd, but seems a perfectly legit target for an IRC bot.

  • Where do I find this botnet? (Score:5, Funny)

    by whoever57 ( 658626 ) on Monday November 02, 2015 @02:15AM (#50845255) Journal

    I have a partial install of Gentoo that I need to work on. The first clean Gentoo install that I have done for almost a decade.

    How can I get this botnet to finish the job?

  • 'The war of the Linux installers'?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      AI bot nets arise and the first thing they do is fight over which Linux distribution to use ? Surely they know by now the only winning move is not playing

  • Could there be anything more useless (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    than this concept?

    I mean, I can get behind almost anything with no point other than "because it would be cool".

    But to attempt to "crowd source" the install of a fucking linux by taking semi-random keystrokes from a chat feed? What's the fucking point? How's that even "cool"?

  • Heh heh (Score:5, Funny)

    by cfalcon ( 779563 ) on Monday November 02, 2015 @05:22AM (#50845497)

    I wonder what plot will next.... emerge?

    Sorry.

  • The war of the machines has begun. It really is the year of the Linux Desktop.

  • anyone else completely confused by the summary? (Score:3, Informative)

    by advocate_one ( 662832 ) on Monday November 02, 2015 @07:29AM (#50845655)
    what the fsck is 'twitch'? Does anyone really care?
  • Start locking up all the supplies you can get your hands on. It's going to be a bad one.

    The good news is that there is a linux version of "This War of Mine", a handy guidebook to situations such as this.

  • It'll take a few weeks to compile, at least

  • So, there's a way to get somebody else to install Gentoo for me? That sounds pretty awesome. I'm going to go and install this "Twitch". I recently went from Gentoo to Arch since my Gentoo was frighteningly out of date and the only way to fix it was a complete reinstall. I figured I would give Arch a shot, but so far I still prefer Gentoo.

  • At time of this posting the botnet is still trying to punch through the same Gentoo install that it was doing yesterday.

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